If you have heard about the law of attraction, then you will know that being highly positive, believing in yourself and acting lucky will all help to make you luckier. That's all great. But simply changing the way you think and feel about yourself isn't quite as easy as just deciding you're going to do it.
Beliefs about ourselves and about the world are deeply ingrained as a result of years of experience. It's no good to just tell yourself you want to believe in your own luck – you have to really believe it right down to your core. Any doubt and you will continue to carry out the same negative patterns.
In fact, there are ways you can 'reprogram' yourself to become precisely the person you want to be.
It was Freud who first postulated that we might have an 'unconscious' aspect to our thoughts and while some of his other ideas have since come under some fire, this one is now accepted by the entire psychological community. Our conscious mind is comprised of all the thoughts and ideas we 'hear' in our head. This is our internal monologue.
Our unconscious mind though is filled with all the fundamental thoughts and ideas we have about the world that are largely outside of our direct control. It's this that you need to change if you want to really believe something but the difficulty lies in getting a concept through the barrier of the conscious mind to the unconscious where it can really have an impact and inform your behavior and self-belief.
The problem is that when you 'tell yourself' something, your mind tends to disregard it and not believe it. Likewise, when someone else tells us a fact, we also tend to reject it.
Hypnotherapy works by trying to avoid this happening. Here, the therapist will often use strategies from the 'Milton Model' of communication as described in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). This involves framing statements in such a way as to get ideas in 'under the radar using implicit assumptions and terms of phrase. Instead of telling someone they 'will be more confident, a hypnotherapist might say 'you might enjoy how much more confident you feel the next time you stand on stage. The difference is subtle but powerful – especially when combined with preparation to put the client in a 'receptive state.