Have you ever felt as if you were making one wrong move after another, resulting in a string of misfortunes?
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Entering a new relationship shortly after leaving a terrible relationship; beginning a new business quickly after abandoning a failed firm; or signing contracts to fix a broken contract are all examples of this.
When a decision has an adverse outcome, such as having a life-altering impact, requiring you to invest or to spend your life savings, or changing the dynamics of your family, etc., a common tendency is to make another major decision or series of decisions to remedy the previous flawed decision yielding undesirable results, and things suddenly begin to spiral out of control.
When this happens to you, you have most certainly entered a cycle of misfortune, which spawns sub-cycles of negativity, demotivation, displacement, and so on.
A cycle of misfortune, or bad luck as some refer to it, will only continue or loop if you enable it to do so by remaining unaware or even in denial.
Anatomy of a ‘bad luck’ cycle
The cycle has a head and a tail, and gaps in-between. If you can identify its start and gaps, then you can immediately break the cycle.
The cycle is started by a trigger, which also gives you an idea of what choice component you need to consider to prevent the cycle from continuing.
Just to give you an example, I will share what happened to me recently. I bought a piece of equipment, which turned out to be defective, and the merchant initially rejected my return request (this rejection marks the start of the cycle). After some wrangling, I was able to get my money back. (this is the pause of the cycle, also an opportunity to break the cycle). So normally, the tendency is to buy another equipment immediately ( the continuation of the cycle).
However, I did not. Because if I spend money right away, I risk falling back into the loop of bad luck with money – money, or spending money, being the trigger for the cycle.
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Stop means stop
In order to halt the cycle, I restrained the trigger, which is STOP spending. Now, I may have been able to break the cycle, but if I continue to be clueless of the patterns of my behaviour when it comes to spending money, the cycle will loop or restart.
My spending pattern is – not exactly impulsiveness, because I have given this purchase much thought. It is not listening to my intuition about when to buy.
My intuition emphasises about timing . The store informed me that there was a limited supply of this brand or model, so I bought the equipment. I was enticed to buy because of its scarcity, but I didn’t realise that scarcity could imply that they are leftover stocks or that the company that makes this equipment no longer makes it. It can mean a lot of things. However, I didn’t buy it because the supply is adequate, but rather out of a sense of not wanting to miss out.
In any case, you don’t need to analyse any of this because your intuition merely indicates a YES or a NO. Similarly, the “half-hearted” sense indicates that you should wait. Wait for something far better to become available or to arrive.
So, once again, the key to breaking the cycle of misfortune resulting from poor or careless decisions is to STOP, literally STOP. Stopping is not a sign of cowardice, or of not being a risk-taker, but rather of taking control of the situation. Restraint is both a type of control and a form of discipline.
So STOP and let the cycle run its course. When you feel you have regained your momentum to make wise and intuitive decisions, act on it. I wish you well, and I hope your new cycle brings you good fortune.
