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Your Luckiest Year Ever - The Science of Luck with Gay Hendricks and Carol Kline

Lace Gilger
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In this episode, we have two incredible guests on the show, Gay Hendricks and Carol Kline. We dig into some of the incredible stories of how Gay and Carol's past, how you can create luck in your life, see more opportunities, and how luck played a huge part in the writing of their latest book!

Gay Hendricks (born 1945 in Leesburg, Florida) is a psychologist, writer, and teacher in the field of personal growth, relationships, and body intelligence. He is best known for his work in relationship enhancement and the development of conscious breathing exercises. After receiving his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1974, Gay began teaching at the University of Colorado. He spent 21 years at the University of Colorado and became a Full Professor in the Counseling Psychology Department while founding The Hendricks Institute.

Carol Kline is a five-time New York Times bestselling author, who has spent her career teaching, writing, and speaking about consciousness and personal growth. Over the last 30 years, Carol has co-authored more than a dozen books, with some of the world’s top transformational leaders—including Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen of Chicken Soup for the Soul fame, Marci Shimoff, Lisa Nichols, and Gay Hendricks. Those books include Happy for No Reason, Love for No Reason, You’ve Got to Read this Book, The Ultimate Dog Lover, and The Ultimate Cat Lover, as well as five books in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Her most recent work with Gay Hendriks is Conscious Luck: Eight Secrets to Intentionally Change Your Fortune.

We discuss...

  • The role timing and luck played in the creation of their new book 7 years in the making.

  • How to cultivate a mindset for conscious luck.

  • What is conscious luck and how is it different than how we typically view luck today.

  • How Jack Canfield played a role in facilitating a working relationship between Carol and Gay.

  • How to be in the right place at the right time.

  • Luck is not a bolt of lightning, it's more like the wind - you just have to build the sail.

  • Anything important in life requires willingness. Then, you need to commit to it.

  • The idea of being lucky is a powerful one.

  • Gratitude is something you do. Appreciation, you feel.

  • You have to be aware of what's going on to welcome in conscious luck.

  • Why you need to prioritize your life now as if you were on death's door.

  • Ask yourself - what are the top 5 things that would make your like feel like a complete and utter success?

  • "Luck chases worthy goals"

  • Bold action is something that moves your goal forward and serves other people. Bold means doing something out of your comfort zone.

  • How to find 20 seconds of "extreme courage" when you need it the most.

  • Success is more about saying NO than anything else.

  • Homework: Float through your mind that you commit to being luckier.

Thank you so much for listening!

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Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

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[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet, bringing the world's top experts right to you. Introducing your hosts, Matt Bodnar and Austin Fabel.

[0:00:18.7] AF: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Science of Success, the number one evidence based growth podcast, still number one, on the internet, with over five million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. I'm your host Austin Fable, and today, we've got an absolutely incredible interview for you with Carol Klein and Gay Hendricks.

We dig into how to develop luck for oneself. How do we find more luck in our lives? Is luck just up to the fates? Or is there a way we can manifest luck to follow us around and to experience more of it in our lives and our endeavors? Tune in to find out. But before we dig in, are you enjoying the show and the content we put out each week? I'm sure you are. Do two things for me, if you don't mind. They're going to only take you a couple of seconds, but they're going to be super helpful for Matt and I.

First, leave us a quick five-star review on the podcast listening platform of your choice. It helps others like you find the show. It doesn't have to be long. You don't have to write a novel here. But just a little something, throw the five stars, it helps other people find the show. Come on, do yourself and them and us a favor, take two seconds.

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Now, if you're on the go, if you're traveling for the holidays, if it's that time of year, just text SMARTER, that's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. And that will sign up on the email list directly from your phone.

If you haven't already, check out last week's episode with Peter Shallard. It's great and if you're going to hit your goals in 2021, it's an absolute must listen.

On this episode, we interviewed two guests, Carol Klein and Gay Hendricks. Gay Hendricks is a psychologist, writer, and teacher in the field of personal growth relationships and body intelligence. He is known for his work and relationship enhancement and the development of conscious breathing exercises. After receiving his PhD in psychology from Stanford University in 1974, Gay began teaching at the University of Colorado. He spent 21 years at the University of Colorado and became a full professor in the Counseling Psychology Department while founding the Hendricks Institute.

Carol Klein, is a five-time New York Times bestselling author who has spent her career teaching, writing, and speaking about consciousness and personal growth. Over the last 30 years, Carol has coauthored more than a dozen books with some of the world's top transformational leaders, including Jack Canfield, previous guest on the show. And Mark Victor Hansen of Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Marci Shimoff, Lisa Nichols and Gay Hendricks, to name just a few more.

Those books include Happy for No Reason, Love for No Reason. You've got to read this book, which we discussed in the interview, best title I've ever heard. The Ultimate Dog Lover and The Ultimate Cat Lover, as well as five books in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Her most recent work with Gay Hendricks is Conscious Luck: Eight Secrets to Intentionally Change Your Fortune, which we had a great time digging into today. The interview has a ton of stories, a lot of laughs. We really did have a great time.

Without further ado, here's our interview with Carol Klein and Gay Hendricks.

[0:03:37.1] AF: Carol, Gay, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:39.4] CK: Thank you for having us.

[0:03:40.8] GH: Thanks a lot, Austin. It's really great to be with you.

[0:03:43.7] AF: Absolutely. We really appreciate you guys taking the time. And I know there's been some scheduling hiccups. So, thank you for sticking there with us. But I really want to just jump right in. So, you've written this book, Conscious Luck together, what was it like to write the book as a joint effort? And what spurred on the creation of the book? Was there something going on in the world today or an experience that might have kind of catalyzed the writing the book?

[0:04:05.8] GH: Well, I've always loved the art of collaboration. And, for example, my wife and I Kathlyn Hendricks, Katie, she and I have coauthored 10 books together over the past 40 years that we've been together. So, I'm really used to collaborating. And when it came time for this book, Carol, dear friend of mine, who lives across town from me, and it's a subject that she was fascinated by too.

So, we just kind of kept bumping into each other at the Farmers Market and I'd tell her a little bit more about it. And finally, one day she said yes, and we signed on. It's been an absolute delight, because if you want to collaborate on a book, it's best to collaborate with someone who's an absolute angel. That's how Carol shows up in the world. And one way she does it is by being a brilliant writer. So, it was great all the way collaborating with her.

[0:05:00.9] CK: Well, I think, I want to just add to that, that for me, this was an incredible example of conscious luck, and that I had seen Gay’s manuscript – we wrote this together sort of 10 years apart, I think. And then we brought it all together, it's a very odd kind of collaboration. Gay wrote the main part of this book and sent it to me as an editor and it haunted me. I had never heard those two words together, conscious and luck. How the heck? And he had sent it to me for my opinion, I gave him my opinion, he went off and did something else. And that book just sat in my mind, in my heart, for almost seven years, just like, “He's got to write that book. He's got to write that book.”

Finally, I did. I bumped into him. He's so funny. He's very modest. I bumped into him, I’m like, “Gay, what are you going to do with that book?” And Gay said, “You know, I'm writing detective fiction now. It's not on my front burner right now.” So, I took the advice of our own book, which I found out later, is one of the secrets of conscious luck is being bold. They had that Roman proverb, “Fortune favors the bold.” I called Gay and I asked him if we could collaborate. And it was the most, one of the most wonderful experiences in my life, to work with Gay and to learn. We would talk, I would learn something from him, we would write it up, we would discuss it and it was a joy from beginning to end.

[0:06:30.8] AF: That's fascinating. I love the kind of history lesson here. I'm just curious, how long have you all known each other and how did you meet?

[0:06:38.9] GH: Well, actually, Carol way back about 15 years ago, through Jack Canfield. Jack Canfield, and I have been friends from way back in the ‘70s, I guess, and I actually helped Jack get his first book published. That's how long we've been friends.

So, Jack and I hatched an idea and then invited Carol into the mix. We wrote a book called, You've Got to Read This Book. It was a collection of 50 or so stories of people whose lives had been changed by a book, prominent people. And so, we really had a great time writing that book together. So, basically, I've known Carol now for a quarter of my life, something like that.

[0:07:20.8] AF: Great company.

[0:07:23.0] CK: Yeah, that was my favorite book. I think, up to that point that I'd ever written. I got to talk to people about books, and books are my thing. So, about books that have changed their lives, it was fascinating.

[0:07:35.6] AF: I got to say, hats off to you all. The title, You've Got to Read This Book, definitely is a great way to move some product, I would say.

[0:07:45.4] GH: Thank you.

[0:07:45.6] AF: So, let's dig in here. I'm super fascinated by this topic. And we've had a number of other folks on the show to discuss how intentional luck and conscious luck can really manifest in your life. But let's just start at the easiest place, the beginning, what is conscious luck?

[0:08:02.9] GH: Conscious luck is being in the right place at the right time. It's learning how to make some shifts in your mind and your body, so that you get supported by the luck that's already there. I know on your podcast that you like to focus on things that have a scientific basis, and one of the great connections we made, I got my doctorate from Stanford in 1974 and there is a professor there now named Tina Seelig, who does research on conscious luck. And we made a good connection with her and Carol was able to interview her. And so that really got us down the path of finding things, finding scientific support for the things in our book.

One of the things that Tina said to us, which has really become a kind of a high watermark of our concept is that luck is not like a lightning strike or a bolt of action, bolt of lightning kind of thing. It's really more like the wind, that it's always there and our job as human beings who want to be luckier, our job is to really learn to harness the motion of those winds, just like a bird does. If you notice a bird flying through the sky, they're not up there wildly flapping their wings trying to stay up. They’re just kind of cruising along using the currents of the wind under their wings. That was a pivotal moment for us when we started thinking of luck that way.

So, I'd always had the kind of a feeling that it was like that, but that gave me a great metaphor, and I really appreciate Dr. Seelig for bringing that to our attention.

[0:09:45.2] CK: Yes, and part of that, that quote that we quote her on about the luck not being isolated and dramatic, but a wind that's always blowing, she mentioned that you have to build a sail, as Gay said, to harness that wind, to ride that win. And how do you build that sail, that's what our book became. It was an organizing metaphor for us, that we present for internal shifts you need to make to raise the sale to harness luck and and for daily practices. A lot of those are based in the positive psychology literature on luck. And it's interesting how it overlaps a bit with the benefits of optimism, learned optimism versus learned helplessness, and about resilience and buoyancy and all the things clear focus with a broad awareness. All these things come about, and they seem to be a cluster of qualities around people who are self-described as lucky.

[0:10:44.4] AF: So, what does it mean to commit to being lucky? Because I've heard you guys speak about that before and some of our guest research, and I've got a number of branches to go off from there. But what does that mean? Is that just me sitting down and saying, like, “I'm going to find luck in everything today?” Because I mean, even the wind and lightning analogy, something that jumps out to me is, it's very hard to miss lightning, right? I mean, it grabs your attention. It’s unavoidable. But the wind, you kind of have to have a different approach. Obviously, gale force wind, you'll notice, but it's kind of one of those subtle things in life, that can be extremely beautiful if you're paying attention. But if you're not, if you're looking at your phone, whatever you might be doing, it's very easy to miss. So, how do we actually have this intentional act of committing to being lucky?

[0:11:31.2] GH: Yes, that's really key, in fact, that's the opening chapter of the book is how to do that. I'll give your listeners a quick 10-second way to do that in a moment. But the idea is that anything important in life, you have to have two things, really. You have to have a willingness to have it happen. So, you need to start with a willingness to be luckier every day, just kind of open your mind to it. That's the starting point. And then you really get going, though, if you will make a commitment to it. Here's the 10-second part, just take a moment right now and say, in your mind, “I commit to being luckier every day of my life.” That gives you a new focal point for your mind to grasp onto. It introduces a new idea into your mind, this idea of being luckier every day of your life.

That means being luckier tomorrow than you are today and the succeeding days, continuing to be open to and be more sensitive to the fluctuations of those wind currents. And you made a key phrase a moment ago, Austin, when you said paying attention, because really, that's a key to it in a way because once you get willing and make a commitment, then the job is to be sensitively aware of what's going on around you. And I tell some stories in the book, one was a story of being in the right place at the right time. But what it took to get there, and quickly, the story was that my plane deposited late at Dallas Fort Worth airport one time. And my plane to catch was on the completely opposite end of this huge airport where I had to take a train and walk and so forth.

So, as I was rushing madly along to try to catch my plane, I saw on the board that my plane had boarded. And so, I kind of eased up and said, “Okay, well, let me go on down there and see.” But I kind of let go of being in a hurry and just kind of got in harmony and was taking a pleasant walk through the airport. I was feeling good. And I got down to the plane, just as the following drama happened. There was a guy shouting at the clerk on the podium, a guy was shouting, “Hey, I must get to wherever it was.” And he was saying, “My name is Humphrey T. Norton III and you will not treat me this way and I'm going to sue you for every dollar you have.” And he was on a total airplane rant. I could see the poor clerk was just kind of sweating it out, and his eyes were lowered and everything and he was saying, “Well, I'm sorry, the door is closed. You got here too late. We'll happy to help you if you'll go to the service center, et cetera.”

I just kind of watched this and then after that guy ran up, went up the concourse shouting and waving his fist and so forth. And I stepped up into the place and I just kind of waited for a moment. And finally, the clerk looked up at me and I said, “Sounds like a pretty rough day around here. I got here late, but I suppose it looks like the plane is already boarded.” And he said, “Yes, I'm sorry.” And just then, the door to the jetway opened, and one of the flight attendants came jogging up to the podium and whispered in the clerk's ear that, “I'm sorry, we miscounted we do have a seat in first class.” And so, conscious luck. I saw the clerk actually glance up the concourse at where the angry guy who's departing, and just saw a little smirk, come on to the clerk space. And then he looked at me and said, “Yes, we did miscount, we have one seat left in first class.”

I went from not being able to get on the plane to sitting there, sipping a beverage in first class within about 30 seconds. And so that's an example of the kind of shifts you have to make to get into harmony with what's going on, so that you're in the right place for these kinds of conscious luck miracles to happen.

[0:15:52.0] AF: It's such a great story. And it reminds me of one that was shared by Dr. Richard Wiseman on a previous episode, and I'm going butcher it entirely, but it was this woman and they were interviewing folks in a luck study. And basically, she said, she was extremely lucky but they went through all these events. And in the span of a month, it was like her house had burned down, her dog had run away and then on the way to the fire department, after her house burned down, she got into a car accident and broke her leg. And she was like, “But it was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Because when she was at the hospital, there was this cute nurse who was attending to her and they got married. And this was like five years after and if she had been so wrapped up in like, “Woe is me” and crying, which would have been understandable by any measure of any sort of thought, what would be like a tragedy of a month, she might have missed talking to this guy and having this conversation and she kind of like was balanced.

But to her, she said that it was like the best month of her life. Because in her mind, she was so lucky because all those events that led her to what was long term happiness, but if she had seen all those events as these big boulders that she couldn't get over, that were going to consume her emotionally, she wouldn't have had the awareness to strike up that conversation or even pick up on some cues that he might have been putting down, that led to her having two kids, a nice house, and a great marriage.

[0:17:15.5] CK: I'm sorry, I just wanted to say Richard Wiseman is another one of the people that is a pioneer of luck research. And one of the things he had, and we have this idea that you said of looking at what happens to you through the lens of, could this be lucky, she didn't have to do that, because it became clear very quickly, that she had been led there to meet this man. And Gay’s story, we call that, that centered way that he was walking that anybody can reproduce in their own lives, their essence pace, and one of my favorite parts of the book was learning about essence pace from Gay, and him telling me the story and then trying it myself. This is something I want to make sure that people know they're going to find that part of your inner GPS, which is how we recommend one of the secrets of daily practices.

If you pay attention to being centered while you're moving, you pay attention to your intuition, you pay attention to your moral compass, and those things will get you to the right place at the right time.

[0:18:17.1] GH: I had a great example of that on another occasion. In fact, I wouldn't be here without a thing that happened. In 1982, I was invited to a party that I didn't really want to go to. But I was in my early days of my relationship with my now wife of 39 years, and so Katie and I had gone to this party. The reason I wasn't keen on going it was an engagement party for a colleague of mine, another psychologist. And he was getting engaged and he was getting married for the fifth time. And I've been around for two, three and four and I didn't have a lot of confidence about number five. I would assume, just at home and wished him well telepathically but Katie wanted to go to the party.

So, we went to the party and it was in a big mansion and I've never been a real great party guy anyway. So, I wandered off into the library of this mansion, they had this beautiful library. I was the only person in there and I could hear the racket of the party in the other part of the house, the band and everything. But I was just having some quiet time looking through the books on the shelf. And this gentleman came in who is a very tall, thin man with bald head. And he was about 20 years older than I was so he would have been about maybe 55 to 60 at the time.

We struck up a conversation. We bonded over the fact that he said something about. “Looks like you don't like small talk any more than I do.” And I said, “That's right.” I forget which one I’ve said. Jokingly, we said, “Well, let's have some big talk.” And he said, “Okay, I almost died six months ago. But it was the best thing that ever happened to me.” I said, “Wow, that's a great opening bid for a conversation.”

So, we got into this conversation about what had happened for him, was being up against death's door for a few months, he had used it as the opportunity to figure out what was missing from his life, and what he had missed out on and what he had valued in his life. But it put him up against the end of his life suddenly, and he did this big evaluation.

The bottom line was, he had come out of that with five goals for his life. He kind of made this promise that, “Okay, if I come out of this, I'm going to do these five things.” Then he turned to me, and he said, “If you were up against death's door tonight, what would be the five things that you did that made your life a complete success?” And it was kind of an odd moment, but it set off a chain of thought in me, that changed my life, because I realized while I was there with my, to be wife, but we hadn't made a decision to get married or anything yet. So, I realized in that moment, that the number one thing I wanted to accomplish or experience in my life that would give my life where I would say, my life was a total success, was I needed to create a relationship with a woman with whom I could grow and change over a long period of time, that I'd never had that kind of long, over period of years relationship where we really work together to build something.

I realized, what's the use in having a PhD in counseling psychology from Stanford if I can't learn to get along with one other person? So, I realized my life would be a failure if I got to the end of my life, and I hadn't done those things. So bottom line is, it caused me to re-evaluate what I really wanted for my life. Our big invitation in conscious luck is to do that also, because another one of the key things we get to in the early part of the book is to how to develop what we call luck worthy goals, and that, Carol, really helped flesh out that part of the book. But to me, luck worthy goals is a key concept that I want everybody to to remember.

[0:22:41.7] AF: Yeah, that's great. I think that that kind of reflection and that kind of exercise, I've heard it phrased in different ways too. It's like writing your own obituary, what would you like to be said? What would you like to accomplish? And kind of using that sort of hypothetical lens really can help put things in perspective. I want to jump into a couple of different things before we do, Carol, why don't you tell us about luck worthy goals,

[0:23:03.8] CK: I would love to. I love Gay’s story and I actually didn't know where it was going to lead. I've never heard that story before. And it's a great ending, because when you think about it, people don't realize that luck chases worthy goals. This is one of the things Gay and I would talk about. How can your goals make you more lucky? How can they help with their own achievement? How can a goal like draw luck or success to you? And what we came up was a luck where the goal has three requirements. It lights you. The thing that you're going to be able to do or allows you to do in the process of achieving that goal is just the thing that makes you the happiest. You do it, if you didn't get paid a dime. So, it lights you up.

A goal, that's luck worthy also, is very meaningful and that's I think, what Gay was talking about, with the five wishes that ended up becoming a book, what were the five things you'd want to accomplish in your life if you’re up your deathbed. That means, if you have a ladder up against a wall and you're climbing this ladder, you better make sure it's the right wall. So, even before you start, you want to like look ahead, will this be meaningful and satisfying to me? This is really bringing me closer to what I feel like I'm on this planet for. And then the last goal is kind of surprising. I call it the good karma effect. Does your goal help you and others? If your goal doesn't help anyone else, you can definitely find success, but you won't get that added mojo of having some little bit of altruism there. Because we call this, when you do that, when you align yourself with the benevolence of the universe, with the way the universe works, the universe has your back. We call them universal links. You get some links from the universe, synchronicities, things like Gay experienced when he was walking at the airport. Amazing things happen when you are in sync with the universe.

So, those three things, having luck worthy goals will really help and attract luck, it gives luck a reason to visit. In fact, luck chases worthy goals. So, it was a great discovery on our part and wonderful thing to add to the book because I don't think people have ever thought about goals in that way before.

[0:25:25.0] AF: I'm so excited to tell you that this episode is brought to you by my very good friend, and three times Science of Success guest, Peter Shallard. He's the founder of Commit Action, and he's known as the shrink for entrepreneurs.

Why is he sponsoring the Science of Success? Well, January is a time when we're all thinking about setting goals and making strategic plans for the year. But if you don't get it right, your best intentions just ended up gathering dust in a drawer. We've all experienced that before, right? Big ambitions in January, totally sidetracked by March.

So, if you truly want to make 2021 your best year ever, then make sure you listen to the special episode we did together on New Year's Eve. We went deep into the science and practice of annual planning, covering the overlooked power of reflection on the past, and how it can unlock huge growth in the future. The science of psychological ecology and how self-sabotage and motivation problems can be avoided entirely by setting your goals the right way, and how to connect the dots between your big picture plans and your actual week to week life, so that your intentions for the year end up becoming concrete reality.

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[0:27:28.4] AF: Yeah, it's definitely a powerful way to look at your goals and I'm just sitting here thinking about the last time I was involved in a project that really, I felt was meaningful, lit me up and also helped others and it's definitely some of the best things that I've accomplished in my life. And the things that I look back whenever I'll see pictures of the event that we held for charity or like the different things we've done, it's always the memories that are kind of the fondest. But I want to kind of tag team this on into one of the ways we achieve conscious luck in the book, which is taking bold action consistently.

So, I could look at maybe a luck worthy goal and say, “Okay, does this check the boxes?” Yes, it lights me up. It's meaningful, and it helps others. How do we balance that with taking bold action and does bold necessarily tied to scale? So, for example, if my bold action is to feed a lot of people in my local community, should I look at that and say, it needs to be bolder, it needs to be more people, what's the kind of the relationship between setting these goals but then also making sure that they're bold and we're taking bold action?

[0:28:32.7] GH: Well, I think that a bold action is really anything that furthers the mission in a straightforward way. So, a bold action could be making a soup, and a bold action might be sponsoring a soup kitchen. Both of them are equivalent in the sense that it's an expression of your essence. It’s an expression of your creative goals and it does serve other people even if the soup kitchen might serve a thousand people and your soup only serves three or four.

[0:29:08.4] CK: And I'd like to jump in and say that bold action in my mind has to do with how much outside your comfort zone it takes you. I'm measuring it from a different standard when I say bold. So, how have you done something that normally you would be afraid of, you would not want to take a risk? And it's been scientifically proven that when you do take more small risks, we're not talking about bungee jumping. I'm not talking actually about physically. It could be being the first one out in the dance floor, saying I'm sorry, asking for promotion, standing up for something. Anything that takes you out of your normal realm will put you in a place that you will meet new people, have different opportunities will come it's it expands your potential for luck and for me, it makes I call it 20 seconds of insane courage. And it has changed my life more than once.

My story comes about, I wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul books in the ‘90s with Jack Canfield. But it started with a moment of incredible fear that I had to overcome to be able to get to that place because it changed my life. I was on one trajectory, and then I became a Chicken Soup for the Soul coauthor. And now I live in Ohio and have a very different life that I would have had otherwise.

I had been directed to talk to a man who was writing Chicken Soup for The Pet Lovers, so I was going to edit his stories. And when I read the stories, they were sent to me, I was so excited. It lit me up. And it's very purposeful for me, I was an animal welfare person. I said, “I want to be a coauthor in this book in my heart.” I said that. So, I thought, “Okay, I'm just going to talk to this guy.” So, when he called, I said, “There's good news, and there's bad news.” And he said, “Okay.” “So, which do you want to hear first?” He said, “Good news.” I said, “The stories are amazing. Any animal lover is going to go crazy for these stories.” And he said, “Great. So, what's the bad news?” And I said, “I'm not going to do it unless I'm a coauthor.”

And that was a big ask, was very gutsy. I thought, “Oh, my gosh.” And he said, “That's not going to happen.” In that moment where I could have gone, “Okay, I need the money. I should just be an editor.” I said, “Okay, well, where should I send the stories back to you?” And I was willing to stand up for it. And he just went, “Wait, wait, wait.” And we ended up, it was my first Chicken Soup for the Soul book. I’ve had 15 books now, sold millions of copies. And it was that moment of 20 seconds of insane courage, when I asked for what I wanted and then I didn't back down. And I wasn't mean, I wasn't aggressive. I was calm, and I was sure of what I wanted.

So, this is what you call dramatic example, but it happens every day, where we can look at those. You don’t have to be brave all the time. You have to look for those windows of opportunity, and then hurl yourself through them.

[0:32:05.7] AF: That's an incredible story, Carol. What a powerful example, in the sense that like, literally a couple of sentences change the entire trajectory of your life. And I think that's really kind of at the core of finding luck, or at least for me, when I all this, when I do this research, it's like, you never know what might be on the other end of that. 20 seconds, right? I mean, it could be anything and your willingness to go back to the beginning of the conversation, to be observant, and to see it. But to stand firm, while also acknowledging that what this opportunity could be. I mean, that's luck right there. In the audience case, it might be a LinkedIn message, it might be a phone call that you know, you need to make or you feel you need to make it. And in your example, it might just be being straight and saying, “This is what I want. And if this is what you're going to give me, best of luck. It's a great book. Animal lovers are going to love it. But if you want me to be involved, this is what I need. And just not backing down.”

[0:33:03.5] CK: And I do have to say that in the course of writing this book, I did a lot of thinking about lucky breaks versus lucky streaks. In a lucky break, anyone can create. Lucky streak requires you to actually stick with it and have some talent, have abilities and go with it, not just count on lucky breaks, but take your persistence.

This isn't magical thinking. I love to say, Gay’s story of committing to luck was mind blowing for me and I'd love for him to tell it because it's one of the best stories, it’s the first story in the book of how he at a young age. And I wanted to say that that's the first step, it opens the door to the rest of the secrets. Gay, do you want to tell that story? I love it. The one about the theater.

[0:33:48.5] GH: Yeah, sure. But I also wanted to chain off one thing, the point you made, Carol, which I think is so important. In our seminars here we teach that success is a lot about what you say yes to. But it is really about what you say no to. One of my entrepreneur mentors, many years ago, Jerry Jones said that the best deals he'd ever done were deals he didn't do. Things that he said no to that later on turned out to be a major disaster, some kind of thing that took everybody down with them. So, saying no, is a really critical function in life and that Carol was willing to say no, and just walk off, that has tremendous amount of power to it.

Regarding the thing that happened when I was in the ninth grade, yeah, this was life changing. I was in a movie theater and for some reason, it was some special thing and they were giving – they’re having a drawing for three prizes and it was, I think, about 250 of us and they put all of our tickets, we wrote our names on our tickets, and put them into a big goldfish bowl and then they had somebody come out and draw three prizes. Just before that happened, this kid that was sitting next to me, Danny, who am I knew a little bit, I didn't know him real well, but he went to the same school I did, leaned over and he said, “Watch, I'm going to win one of these.” Okay.

So, they did the drawing, and sure enough, he won the top prize. He won the wristwatch, which in 1959 was a pretty cool thing. And so afterwards, I asked him, “How did you do that? How did you know you were going to win?” And he said, “I always win stuff like that.” He said, “I just made up my mind one day that I was going to be one of the lucky ones.” And I asked him to explain more and he turned out, he was from a family, where one side of the family was kind of downtrodden and the other side of the family did really well. And he said, he realized that those folks thought of themselves as really lucky. And the other folks thought of themselves as really unlucky. And so, he decided, “Okay, I'm going to be one of the lucky ones.”

So, that was my first commitment too, I said, “Okay, I'm going to be one of the lucky ones, too.” And right after that happened, I had this amazing thing happened, that on the street, I found a satchel, a briefcase that had a small fortune of a coin collection in it, and I was able to return it to the owner. I got a front-page story in the newspaper, “The boy that returned the fortune”, then the coin collector that these had belonged to, sent me a coin collection that was worth about $35, which to a kid that got 50 cents a week allowance, that was pretty darn good.

That was a big imprint on me that has lasted my whole life. Although, I didn't get around to writing the book for about 50 years.

[0:36:53.4] AF: It's such a great story. I feel like we could probably sit here all day and kind of analyze all the big breaks we've had in our life. But I want to circle back real quick and change gears a little bit into something that Carol said, and it's about kind of analyzing lucky breaks versus lucky streaks. I think one of the key components to any sort of consistency in anything is the group around you. The people that you surround yourself with, and it's a weird time to be having this conversation, because as we record, this COVID-19 pandemic is hitting all-time highs. We do have a vaccine coming. But it's tougher to be around people, right? That sense of connection that we get from being in a large group is kind of altered in a lot of ways, I think permanently.

One of the things you all talk about is finding your lucky tribe. And I think that's just such an important component to the long-term success of all these practices. How do we find our lucky tribe? And then, more specifically, in this world we live in today, how do we stay connected to this tribe to make sure we keep our mindset right, we keep our motivation moving, and we create more of these lucky streaks?

[0:38:06.7] CK: Well, I'd like to take a first stab at this, and that, I feel even though we are in sort of a more virtual reality now because of being locked down and trying to social distance, there is still and we've been moving towards this for years. There's a virtual community that has very, very deep feelings of connection. And it's not so much quantity, quantity as much as quality the people around you, they've done studies, they absolutely affect so much about who you are. There's a quote, “You can't have a positive life with a negative mind.” And I think the same thing is true, you can't have a positive life with a negative community. Very difficult. The people around you tend to drag you down or lift you up.

One of the things I love about Gay’s work is that it's so grounded in the body. It's a body-mind kind of approach to life. And he talks about the conspiracy. Are you in a good luck conspiracy or a bad luck conspiracy? Conspiracy just means to breathe together and these days, it's kind of a word that's got a different meaning. Yeah, but when you conspire, you can breathe, spire breathe and calm together. So, who are you breathing with? Who are you hanging with? Who are you taking in life and giving out opinions? Who are you with? And one of the ways that Gay and I recommend in the book is that you really tune into your physical response to people. You can go through your phone, you can go through your friends on Facebook, you can go through your address book, that was a dated thing, but you might still have an address book or something like that. And what is your initial feeling, as soon as you see that person's name or their picture, do you expand? Do you smile? Do your eyes light up or do you contract? Do you feel heavier?

This will give you a sense right now, right today, of the people who you want to spend more time with, and the people you want to spend less time with, and you don't have to cut those negative or those people that shrink you, you have to cut them out of your life, you could be related to them, you could live with them, you could work with them. But you do know being aware of that will definitely help you. Sometimes people aren't just – we trade victim stories with people, like the awful eyes. And sometimes people who make us contract or people who sort of don't support our best self, we don't support our dreams. And so, we stop participating in the victimization stories. Just that's something you can do, even if you can't stop being around those people. And we don't talk about our dreams and goals with people who rain on our parade.

So, there's very, very positive and clear practical things we can do with this knowledge of who's in our lucky community, and who's not.

[0:40:58.1] GH: You always know people around you that when you're with them, you can breathe more freely, you can speak more freely, you feel more at ease. I always tell my students to focus their social life on three to five people who make your face light up when you walk in the room, or whose faces light up when you walk in the room. You don't need 300 friends. Maybe on Facebook, it's fine to have 3 million friends. But what you really want is four or five people whose faces light up every time you walk in the room.

[0:41:29.7] AF: Yeah, I feel like it's super impactful and I think that having those five people around, I think Carol your point too, to where we don't need to necessarily completely cut off ties to these people that aren’t in that five people or a group of five. But we don't really need to take a lot of stock and allow ourselves to be emotionally changed by people outside of that five. And I think that's so critical, too, because I've heard in a lot of books and a lot of interviews we've done, I've actually heard you know, “No, you need to cut all negativity out of your life.” And in some cases, like you said, I mean, you’re related to these people. You can't you can't just say, “Sorry, you're not checking my box right now. Get out.” But I do think it's something really important to aspire to and I think that you really need to be careful these days, whose advice you take and who's you don't. And if you look at someone that they don't light you up, and they're not living the kind of life that you would want to live. It's okay to hear him out. But probably not the advice you want to act on.

[0:42:25.9] CK: And I think you said something really beautiful is that, you know, we can't cut everybody. I don't think it's a strength to only surround yourself with people. I mean, in your work life. You have to be able to maintain your inner light, even when there's darkness around. Actually, we talked about this, somebody asked us a question, what about those people who are so positive, they won't ever entertain anything negative. And we talked about being authentic and real. You don't want to commiserate with people and wallow. But you also don't want to be around people who we call like militantly positive, who won't even address reality. That is equally damaging and equally contracting.

So, it’s a matter, the people who really love you and who really support your best self, know that you might have a place in your life, whether you're going through roughness, but they'll listen and then they'll help you move on to what you want to be and where you want to be.

[0:43:22.3] AF: I want to talk real quickly because I know where we're running out of time here. But there's another topic that I think is super important and really close to my heart. And that's practicing radical gratitude and appreciation. And if you don't mind, I'd like to share a quick story of my own, but it just kind of ties all these things together. This must have been 10 years ago. I was kind of looking for a new role, a new job, and wasn't really sure what it was going to be, it wasn't like time specific, but I was just kind of unhappy, wasn't sure what I was going to do.

I had this strange inclination one day and I had a mentor of mine when I was in college, I had this internship and I was a sophomore, and this this mentor of mine, she was great. I bussed tables, never really had a corporate job or any sort of like business type job, and my big project for the internship was at the end of the summer, I had to present this deck about what I'd done to the VP of this major company, which for a 20-year-old is like, I mean, cue my cold sweats right now, my palms are getting sweaty, just talking about it.

So, on week one of my my internship, she had me start building this deck, and every week we'd meet for like a weekly checkup and we'd meet at this Starbucks outside of Memphis. She would have me stand up at eight o'clock in the morning at Starbucks and go through this deck and basically, just present to anyone who wanted to sit down and I was petrified. But by the end of the summer, I had an incredible deck. My public speaking spills had gone through the roof. I was the youngest guy in the internship and I crushed it.

I was just thinking about her one day, about 10 years ago, and I just called her. I still have her cell phone number and I was just like, “Jamie, you know, how are you doing? This is Austin. I hope you've been doing well. I just wanted to call and let you know that you made an impact that summer on my life that has served me extremely well over the course of my career and I just want you to know that I think about you often, and you really made a difference in my life.” I don't know what was going on, but something had happened with her family, she broke into tears. And we just got to talking and we kind of stayed in touch and turned out that there was a job opening a couple of weeks later, and she reached out to me and was like, “I have no idea what you're doing, but if you'd like to interview for this job, we'd love to have you.”

In the end, it ended up not being the right opportunity for me. Nothing came of it. But just through practicing, I hadn't talked to her in a decade and just happen to have the number and called her, this opportunity opened up to me that ultimately didn't pan out, but was just conceived out of gratitude, and nothing else.

[0:46:09.6] CK: Beautiful. It's funny, Gay made a distinction that I had never made before is gratitude is something you feel and appreciation is something you do. And you've talked about this, your gratitude caused you to express appreciation. and express appreciation is one of the most important things you can do for success and for luck and for your own feelings of connection with people. It fosters collaboration and deeper relationships and it makes you stand out. And I'm sort of a more open book a person, it also creates open heartedness, which makes you more attractive as a human being. That thing that you just talked about, where you reached out to her without any – there was absolutely no thought of gain. It was from a deep, true, authentic place in you that you wanted to tell her. And that will make big differences in your life to be that kind of person that does that. Appreciation is a big secret and luck in the practical, and gratitude is a big secret and feeling lucky on every level.

[0:47:09.4] AF: How do you all practice gratitude and appreciation in your everyday lives?

[0:47:13.6] GH: Well, one thing I was just reflecting on with your story, Austin, was a magic moment in my life. I had a minister in a Youth Day at the Methodist Church in Florida when I was about 15. We went to this Youth Day, and this minister made this incredible speech that just rearranged my brain cells basically. And I don't know where they got this minister, but he was definitely not a Southern Methodist type minister, because he said, “Hey, kids, all your life, people are going to try to get you to conform to buy the right major appliance, to have 2.5 kids and to, basically, do life by the script”. And he said, “Be very wary of that, because every time you trade security for letting go of one of your precious life goals, you diminish yourself and then finally, there won't be anything left out of you. So, make sure you stay alive with those goals you have that may be different from everybody else's.”

It was a pretty electrifying thing to say, to any group, but back in 19, whatever it was, 60 or something like that. But it really made my hair stand on it in a way. And I thought about it so much and used that to build my life. And so, one day, when I was in my 30s, suddenly it occurred to me, “My gosh. I've never thanked this minister”, whose name turned out to be Jay Wallace Hamilton. So, I had to do some kind of detective work to find out where he was, and that kind of thing, or if he was still alive, and it so happened that he had passed on. But I was able to contact his widow. I had this amazing conversation with her where I told her how much this had changed my life.

At that very time, she told me that she had just been sitting there wondering if her life had really had any meaning. And you know, she was 83 years old or something like that, and then this call comes in. I ended up being a wonderful relationship where she ended up sending me some of his books and that kind of thing. So, it really turned out to be something that I'll be thinking about all of my life. So, just that reaching out, however you can do it, it has so much reward to it. And I've now made it kind of a practice to do that whenever I think about it, but I remember that one moment vividly because it happened to come in a moment where she really valued it.

[0:49:55.6] AF: And I think it's probably safe to say, there's no downside to reaching out to someone and expressing this gratitude. I think the very minimum, like the very, very, very minimum that can happen is you're going to feel great about it and have a great day. The biggest thing that could come out of it might be something that completely changes your life for the better, for the rest of it.

[0:50:16.8] CK: Yeah. Tina Seelig tells a really brief story about a guy, they turned down people for their programs at Stanford routinely, and sometimes she gets letters saying, “Could I have done better? How I could get it next time I apply?” This one man just had been turned down twice, and a young man said, “I just want to thank you. It was an amazing experience. I learned a lot from it.” And she remembered that guy, because it was so gracious and so big of him. And they ended up connecting. She reached out to him, she had a program that she thought would be good for him. And they ended up doing something where they worked with, they formed a little nonprofit together and it was incredible. And it was all because this man was so clear, he did this and she started doing it too, every day at the end of her day, she writes a thank you email to people who she had met that day. She does a little inventory and says, “Believe me, it has improved my luck, thousandfold.”

[0:51:16.6] GH: I'll tell you another amazing story is that one time and I'm just now forgetting the gentleman's name, it goes back 30 years, but he was the top interviewer, the top lie detector interviewer for the FBI, and in the context of that had been present, while more than 3,000 people confessed to some crime as a result of his lie detective work. So, what did he learned from this? Well, for one thing, every holiday time, he gets flooded with Christmas cards from people in prison, still thanking him for having been there when they confess their crime.

I found that so hard to believe that I went up and talked to him after the talk, and I said, “Really? You’re not just BS-ing it?” It turns out, he has this whole collection of hundreds of Christmas cards from people saying, “Thank you. That changed my life. Even though I'm prison, I feel so much better that I'm glad I did it.” So, let that be a lesson to be really transparent before we end up in jail and appreciating it. Just appreciating the possibility right now.

[0:52:33.1] AF: You guys, this has been a great conversation. Before we go. I want to be respectful of your time, but we'll definitely do it again soon. But what's one piece of homework you would give the audience?

[0:52:45.0] GH: For me, it would be just to run that idea, that commitment idea through your mind, just float through your mind, every day or two. I commit to being luckier every day of my life. Just float that through your mind. Maybe even write it down, maybe even put it on your dashboard, maybe put it on your mirror at home, but just this idea, keep it alive. And there are a number of other approaches in the book, but that'll really get you started.

[0:53:12.6] CK: And I was going to say, it's going to sound so shamelessly self-promoting, but really, I recommend you get this book, because everything we've talked about, Conscious Luck, and I also want to say that Conscious Luck workbook is going to be out. We took everything in Conscious Luck and made a workbook. So, if you go to consciousluck.com, you can find out about it.

But when you make a commitment to being lucky, everything that's stopping you, everything comes up, this is stupid, this can't work, and anything that comes up that feels like you can't be lucky, is really stopping you in every part of your life. So, this commitment is just the very first thing of exploring your own relationship to luck. How do you feel about it? Do you feel you deserve to be lucky? Are you worthy of luck? And this can really, really change the trajectory when you get clear and authentic about your own luck and your own worthiness of luck.

[0:54:03.2] AF: Well, Carol, Gay, this has been a great conversation. Thank you again, for putting up with all the scheduling missteps we have and for the time today. I'd love to do it again sometime. And we'll be sure to link to all of your social media profiles, websites, and of course, the book and the workbook and all the show notes as well. So, for those listening right now, go to the website and check that out.

Gay, Carol, thank you so much for the time for coming on the Science of Success.

[0:54:25.7] CK: Thank you. It was wonderful.

[0:54:27.5] GH: Thank you so much.

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