"Conscious Luck" Book Review & Interview with Gay Hendricks
Is luck a fixed thing, unchanging and our of our control? Or is it something we can shape, create, and call forth into our lives?
In their book, Conscious Luck, Gay Hendricks and Carol Kline offer a practical guide to creating a luckier life. In this guide, I’ll not only review the book, but also share my personal experience applying some of the secrets provided to my life as a business owner.
Essential Book Information
Conscious Luck, by Gay Hendricks and Carol Kline, is not just a book, but a step-by-step program following their eight secrets to creating your own luck. It was published in May, 2020.
Basic Summary
The book is broken up into two main sections. The first, written primarily by Gay, offers four foundational secrets about how to rethink our relationship to luck. In this section Gay covers topics like how to step into a new mindset of being a lucky person, how to set right-sized goals, and how to work with limiting beliefs and shame.
The second section brings Carol more squarely into the book and discusses topics like how to take right actions to create luck, how to surround yourself with the right people, and a couple other practices to bring luck into your daily life.
Praise
While I haven’t previously read anything of Carol Kline’s, I’ve been a fan of Gay Hendricks for years and read many of his books, from his more technical reads aimed at therapists like At The Speed of Life and Conscious Breathing to his more relatable self-help books like The Big Leap and Learning to Love Yourself.
I’m also a very driven entrepreneur and don’t like to waste my time. So, my first thought upon ordering this book was, “will I learn anything new from Gay this time?”
I was pleasantly surprised to find that he brought forward a number of new concepts and practices I’d never heard from him. One that I applied right away to my life was his process around the topic of shame.
He and Carol dedicate a whole chapter to shame, and how to turn it around, which I think is a brilliant move because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of spiritual bypassing when dealing with self-help or transformational teachings. In his other books he focuses on the core emotions of fear, sadness, anger, joy, and sexual feelings, inviting folks into a healthy relationship with each of them. Yet, I’d never heard his take on the complex topic of shame.
Given that he’s spent the last 40 years working with clients, teaching workshops on psychology-related topics, and has a background as a Ph.D. psychologist and former professor of counseling psychology at the University of Colorado, I was deeply enthralled to read his recommendations on how to work with shame.
As I sat there reading and going through the step-by-step process he provides for how to transform shame, I realized that in my own life I’m constantly bombarded with shame-based thoughts as I go about life. I noticed about every 2 seconds a thought like, “I’m not doing this right,” “If only I would...I’d be better off,” or “Why am I just sitting here reading this book when I should be working!” - thoughts that could and do apply to practically everything I’m doing.
I was stunned to sit there and actually hear this constant barrage. In the process that followed I was able to calm those thoughts and dig deeper to find a loving, accepting place where the shame feelings and thoughts could come to rest in embracing arms.
To me, being able to create a process that does the above is a masterful work. So for this section alone I recommend reading the book. Being able to work with shame as an entrepreneur is a necessary skill, and you should take all the resources you can get on the subject.
In talking with him later during our interview, I found out that he hadn’t written much about shame before because it wasn’t until writing the first manuscript for this book that he had his own personal awakening around how to work with shame. Watch the full interview with Gay Hendricks here.
I also found the sections about making commitments, goal setting, and being in the right place at the right time valuable information for the inner path of the entrepreneur.
Critique
Given that the authors are both wealthy white folks, I would have liked to see more discussion of how systemic oppression affects the mindset of the typically oppressed, and how they can work with those challenges to change their luck. If luck is a force that like the wind is constantly flowing, and some are born in more privileged situations than others, would that be like some folks having access to bigger sails than others?
As a white cisgendered man, I’m always on the lookout for more ways to reduce my blindspots and consider the perspectives of those whose experiences have been culturally considered less worth listening to than my own. Digging into this gritty topic is necessary at this time in history, and would help build more trust in the authors to work with all populations around luck.
One acknowledgement I’ll give the authors is that they publicly changed the language around one concept in the book post-publishing.
Finally, there are a couple of the eight secrets that seem to be in most self-help books, such as practicing daily gratitude. For me they don’t count as “secrets” anymore. That said, for folks new to self-help they very well may be brand new practices.
My Recommendation
Overall I really enjoyed the book, and found the lessons in it to be quite useful in my personal life and life as an entrepreneur. I’d highly recommend reading it and taking the eight secrets seriously. It will make a difference in your life. If there’s one thing I want to praise Gay and Carol for above all else, it’s that they continue to create inspiring books that normalize inner therapeutic work, and encourage people to live in a loving, generous way. For this I thank them.
The Interview
I was fortunate enough to get to interview Gay Hendricks on how to apply the lessons of Conscious Luck to entrepreneurship. This video is highly worthwhile. You can watch the whole thing here.
