People avoid walking under ladders, salute
a single magpie or wear their lucky undergarments to name but a few. Some cast these off as quirks that have no
relevance in the real world – that affect nothing and are therefore
useless. However, the opposite can be argued.
On a recent course a delegate revealed she had passed her driving test at the fourth attempt. When I asked 'if you had failed it that fourth
time instead of passing it, would you have retaken it a fifth time?'; she said 'of course she would, however, probably would have to move
straight to the sixth attempt to pass because she has a thing against odd
numbers.' (At least that's how I
remember the conversation). Luckily the
room took it in the spirit it was intended and everyone had a good belly laugh,
including her I might add.
My Grandmother truly believed that bad
things happen in 3’s. A statement I have
heard regularly in the past. If we think about this – although it may
not be helpful, it may not be so illogical either.
We have a filter in our brain that allows
us to take in the information most relevant to us at any particular time. This is why you notice a certain car drive
past you on the road once you decide you are going to buy that model. This is why you are able to ‘ignore’ all the
other cars on the road to concentrate on the things that are important (such as
potential hazards to avoid). You filter
things in and out according to your perceptions and beliefs. After witnessing the first ‘bad thing’, my
grandmother would spend the rest of the day focusing on finding the other two.
If someone sets a goal to run a marathon,
they begin to notice runners out on the street.
Those runners were there before; they were just filtered out as being
less important than something else at that time.
Superstitions work in the same way. Someone wears their lucky pants for a big
meeting, their mindset is just that little bit more positive about how their big
meeting will go as a result. They feel
more confident and therefore stand a better chance of behaving more
effectively. Someone walks under a
ladder, they spend the rest of the day focusing on any negative they see and
attribute it to this arbitrary event (if that is what they believe happens as a result). The same negatives may have happened anyway,
but if we don’t focus on them they won’t define our day in the same way.
A superstition therefore DOES affect the
outside world. Through a shift in an
individual’s focus and what they filter in and out, it drives different
perceptions, emotions and therefore behaviour.
Our behaviour then affects the outside world - indeed it is the only way we do affect the outside world.
So superstitions aren’t so suspicious. They are perfectly logical in the way they
work – it’s just that we need to make them work for us rather than against us.
And yes - in case you're wondering, my Grandmother always completed the set in the
end.
