Episode Transcript

Note: The following transcript is a draft transcript, and as such, may contain computer-generated mistranslations. (Transcript coming soon).

Bruce Langford:

When I read the first three chapters of this book, which you specifically wrote, you made it sound simple. I got really excited. I was like, oh, wow, this isn't so complicated. This isn't so difficult. Yes. I can do this. And that's your writing style and it's also years of wisdom that have, you know, made it possible for you to share this way with your, with your readers. So, Carol, what did you think when Gay first came to you with this idea, and then you met in the grocery store and you'd chatted and you had this idea. Tell us your thoughts about that.

Carol Kline, Conscious Luck:

Well, Gay sent me this manuscript in 2012, I think. And it was not in its present form. It was sort of a seed. And the two words together conscious and luck really struck me because my experience in luck was that it wasn't conscious at all. It happened to you. You didn't have any control over it. Good things happen, bad things happen, and you are just at luck's mercy. And so when he introduced this concept to my awareness of conscious luck, it was like …. you know, I just, my, my head kind of exploded and I read the first parts of it. And you know, other `parts where they're in seed form. And I got very excited because I realized that luck, like health, like happiness, I'd written a book called happy for no reason by that time. And I knew that there was some static genetic part of your happiness set point.

Carol Kline, Conscious Luck:

Well, luck has the same sort of thing that you, you can affect it. You can change it by your actions, by your attitudes and by your association. And when I understood that luck, wasn't capricious mysterious superstitious, but that it was based on things I thought and who I hung out with. It just was a revelation. And I got very excited and Gay didn't want to write the book. Well, he was busy with other things. He was busy. So, it haunted me and I nagged him very, very, very gently. I would see him a few times a year, maybe. So it wasn't like I was always asking him, but I really thought this book should come out. It haunted me. It was on my computer, you know, desktop. I saw an icon that was the word document of conscious luck. So, it really, to me, needed to be brought out in the world. And it's an absolutely fantastic paradigm shift for people.

Bruce Langford:

Well, Gay, you said you were raised to harbor a great deal of shame inside you and the third secret is about that. And that was one of the secrets that I found extremely revealing and powerful for me personally. Can you talk about that, Gay and just tell our listeners about that secret?

Gay Hendricks, Conscious Luck:

Yes. I discovered something about my self when I was 45 years old. My brother and I were down helping clear out my mother's house after she passed away. We were going to sell it. And I was moving a picture frame into a box. And out of the back of the picture frame fell an envelope and letter. And I looked at it and it was to my mother, from her church group in 1945. And I realized that's the year I was born. And so I opened it up and read it. And apparently she had stuck it in there way back because it, you know, dust came off of it and everything. And what it was was this heartfelt plea from my mother's church group to my mother. And it was saying, Norma, you don't need to just sit in your house and feel shame all the time. I know you, it wasn't perfect the way the birth happened and what happened with your husband and, you know, it was this condolence letter, but saying, you must come out of your house.

Gay Hendricks, Conscious Luck:

You just can't sit in there and feel ashamed all your life. And it was the date on, it was several months, like six months after I'd been born. And so apparently according to I, I found out more about the family story and my mother had gone into quite a funk when I was born and had trouble taking care of me. And then my grandmother stepped in. But the shame part was the part that really captivated my attention because I realized, wow, I had spent the first nine months of my prenatal existence being kind of pickled in shame and not for something I did, but because of something somebody else felt. And then for six months afterwards, that must have been in the picture too. And as I was standing there, I realized as I tune into it, I can feel it all over my body, but I can particularly feel it down in my legs and the lower part of my body.

Gay Hendricks, Conscious Luck:

And it's interesting because I'd never really felt shame before that I could think of, you know, I'd felt anger and I'd felt fear and I'd felt anxiety and I'd felt sadness. The whole concept of shame just didn't resonate with me. And in fact, a colleague of mine, John Bradshaw had written an entire book about shame and I started to read it and I thought, no, I don't get it. And so he and I were good friends even. And so what happened was in that moment, I tuned in, and I could feel all of this territory in my body occupied by shame, but then this idea donned on me. So just because I feel it in that area now doesn't mean I have to feel that forever. And so I let myself feel it. But then I rededicated that territory to becoming an attractor field for luck and love.

Gay Hendricks, Conscious Luck:

And anybody can do that. Anything that you discover in yourself, you can replant that field if you want. That's one of the great gifts of human consciousness is that we can, we're only one breath in one thought away from changing anything about our lives. And so in that moment, I read it rededicated my field of shame and rededicated it as a luck and love attractor. And so that's what you can do if you uncover any kind of painful emotions and you first feel them love them, open up to them, say, okay, to them be mindful about them, but you don't have to. It's like one of my mentors said, just because the bluebird of unhappiness landed in your head on one occasion, you don't have to let it build a nest there. And so the idea is that we can be with our feelings in a loving way, but then replant them with something else. If we want to [replace it with] something we like better.

Bruce Langford:

And that's exciting, Mindful Tribe. If you're listening right now, we're talking about the book Conscious Luck with Carol Kline and Dr. Gay Hendricks, and you can check it out. ConsciousLuck.com, very simple. Carol, I want to ask you about three letters because this is how you start off the book. Very, very exciting. When you read this and believe it. The three letters are VLP. Tell us about that.

Carol Kline, Conscious Luck:

So committing to be a VLT, a very lucky person. And I have to say I was raised very intellectually and analytically. So when I first read this, like, wait a second, it's gotta take more than just deciding, you know, and I read a case story and I was really taken by it. And really after sitting with Gay and working with Gay, I am a convert. The commitment, the first step in conscious change is the willingness to change. Then the second step, this is all completely documented by positive psychology is your mindset. As Gay mentioned earlier. So becoming a very lucky person has to do with the very first thing is thinking about yourself in a different way. And, but it is only the first step. It is the thing that breaks the ice. It's the bow of a ship. That's like the cow-catcher on the train, you can't go forward until you've made that commitment and to think of yourself as a lucky person.

Carol Kline, Conscious Luck:

And for me, there was a mental shift that happened. We were interviewing people and I saw this woman. She's a professor at Stanford. Her name is Dr. Tina Selleck and Dr. Tina Selleck said many people think of luck as a dramatic isolated event, like a lightning strike. When in fact it's like a wind that's blowing and all you have to do is raise your sail, build a sail out of behaviors and attitudes and things to cap the winds of luck. When I made that shift, it became committing to luck. Wasn't magical thinking, committing to luck was saying, I can create luck in my life by my mind, by what I do, by the friends that I hang out with. And so that's what becoming a very lucky person means. And then the last half of the book, which I hope you'll ask us about really cements that about gratitude and appreciation.