“…chance encounters play a prominent role in shaping the course of human lives.”
~ Albert Bandura
Former president, American Psychological Association
“Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors only the prepared mind.”
~ Louis Pasteur
A friend of mine recently went through a tough time: a personal crisis. She was scouring for signs of something positive, anything that would offer a ray of hope or light for her situation. She decided to go out for some tea when she encountered a woman, unknown to her, who began chatting about the trials and tribulations of her life.
The woman spoke of gratitude for those who had courage, and at the end of what was essentially a monologue the woman said to my friend: “Everybody goes through difficulties. Surround yourself with positive people and hang in there.” With that the woman got up and left. My friend had not shared a word of her difficulties, yet this chance encounter satisfied her need to receive something positive.
Coincidence?
Perhaps. But the intriguing feature of this story is that the chance encounter provided the necessary spark of encouragement and hope. My friend e-mailed me and wanted to know what the positive psychology folks might think about such a meeting: How might fortuitous circumstances influence our wellbeing?
In 1957, writer and cartoonist Allen Saunders offered the quote: “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” John Lennon later popularized the above sentiment in his song Beautiful Boy. We can all relate. We spend so much time working toward something, only to have the unexpected snare our attention and take us in a completely different direction. Of course this could be for better or worse. But is there a science underneath the positivity of chance encounters? We can test it out.
Think of the three best, most important experiences in your life. Really. Take a moment to do this. No particular order — but three things that happened to you that really changed your life. Once you think about it you will realize that one or two, if not all three were likely to have happened by chance. Sure, there was the degree you received that you worked on for years, or the promotion at work you deserved. But it is probable that at least some of the major positive experiences of your life were chance happenings; people or circumstances you couldn’t predict or control. They just happened.
Yet psychology is defined as a science that helps us describe, predict and control behavior. So here is a seeming contradiction. The major events in life — how we met our spouse or lover, what profession we chose, or friend we’ve made — may have all happened by chance. Some of the things that have made us happiest in life were never on our to-do list.
Who we become is greatly influenced by what happens beyond our control. And yet, as your own life has likely revealed, there is evidence that chance encounters can, and do, positively influence our lives. Perhaps it is time to build this into the formula for expecting, and experiencing more joy and more hope in our lives.
Albert Bandura wrote a paper thirty years ago that highlighted chance occurrences as the blind spot in psychology. He looked at both positive and negative chance encounters. But what is intriguing from the recent advances in positive psychology is that positive thoughts and expectations may facilitate and enhance the experience of a chance encounter. Bandura also pointed out that “fortuitous influences may be unforeseen, but having had occurred, they enter as causal chains in the same way as prearranged ones do.”
In the May 2010 issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology researchers Peters, Flink, Boersma and Linton demonstrated that subjects who imagined a “best possible self” (BPS) for one minute and wrote down their thoughts generated a significant increase in positive affect. The researchers also concluded “…that imaging a positive future can indeed increase expectancies for a positive future.” In other words, the researchers demonstrated it was possible to induce optimism.
By inducing optimism the prepared mind becomes a positive one. This is an intriguing finding: it suggests that we can change both how we feel in the moment, and how we feel about what is to come. If we are prepared properly and are optimistic we are likely to incorporate the chance encounter and use it as a positive experience. The glass we were not expecting to see will be half full.
But can being optimistic really make a difference? There are many studies now that suggest optimism can help with everything from sales to grades. Martin Seligman’s book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life ushered in the research on the advantages of having an optimistic attitude. If you are interested in your level of optimism here is a quiz you can take based on Dr. Seligman’s book. But the very short answer is yes: Having a positive outlook makes a big difference in our outlook and productivity.
The challenge is for us to cultivate as much optimism as we can muster, and to do this in anticipation of the unforeseen. This is important because as Heraclitus said, “If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it…”
I was in the process of preparing my next Proof Positive post when the e-mail from my friend came in. I left what I was writing for a future time and was inspired to prepare this post instead.
Now you’re reading it.
As Bandura pointed out 30 years ago…
7 comments
I would have to call into question, a little bit of what is considered “Chance”. In most of the scenarios, there are steps of very deliberate, if not necessarily thought about, decisions that put ourselves into the circumstances that the so called, “Chance” encounters occur. While the outcome of these encounters, nor even the context of them was anticipated nor planned, the choices that the individual makes that lead up to these encounters must be made.
The person has to have made the decisions the brought the situations into being. Be it a chance meeting some where, or what have you. Like the article used to cite an example, the person had to decide to go to that specific place, to allow that meeting to occur.
I thereby claim that the events that occur are not completely “Chance” but specific acts that we choose to do, that put ourselves in the situation that allow “chance” or apparently “Random” events to occur. But we must have made all the choices before hand that lead up to that chance encounter.
So I claim that it is not really “Chance” at all, but a series of choices or decisions that we make that put ourselves into situations that allow for such occurrences to happen.
Also, consider that our state of mind, must have a huge bearing on such occurrences as well. When we are pre-occupied with work, worry, jobs, or what have you, there could be many possible “Chance” occurances that could have happened, but we never take notice. I would be willing to bet that it is most often when the unusual, unexpected, unplanned, or altered environments that make us aware of our surroundings, or thus “changes in our expected environment” may we even notice such “Chance” encounters.
It stands to reason that it seems only when something is “different” do people pay enough attention to their surroundings to notice, or experience a “Chance” encounter.
We hear about ‘resonating’ with people and we understand and accept it, at that level, without further thought. Imagine that whenever you are thinking, those thoughts send out waves. Also imagine that your ‘giving off’ body language that will match those thoughts.
Consider that we accept the idea of ‘tuning in’ to someone. Consider also that we accept the idea of ‘being on someone’s wavelength’.
Combine these ideas and we can see that whatever thoughts we are having positive/negative are traveling like waves to others and we start attracting like minded people.
This can leave us in a downward spiral if we’re having a tough time and all our thoughts are negative. How wonderful, then, that there are people out there who can tune in to our negatives yet help us to adjust our frequency.
Getting ourselves on a positive frequency will help us to attract all the things we want from life. It works like nothing else.
Send out positive thoughts to the universe and trust me, good things will return.
I met my business partner on a night bus!
We were from different worlds, my background was in holistic health while his was in advertising services. I was coming back from an inspiring talk on connecting with your purpose, whilst Carl was returning (as usual) from a late night at work.
Our paths would never have crossed other than by chance encounter.
Since then we have both benefitted massively from connecting, sharing ideas and meeting each others friends. And from the spark of that chance meeting, we created Wellbeing In the City:
Great to see more prominence being given to chance events. Psychology has a poor record of acknowledging and researching chance events in our lives. In my field of vocational psychology, myself and my colleague Dr Robert Pryor have been working on the Chaos Theory of Careers (Routledge, 2011) for over a decade – emphasising that many careers (about 80% – Pryor & Bright, Jnl Vocational Behavior, 2005) are influenced by chance events.
Despite the ubiquity of chance events we continue to be drawn to models that are overly rational, and hubristically over-emphasise the degree of personal control in any given situation. The previous comment in this thread seeking to explain away chance events as the result of a series of choices is an example of this post hoc rationalisation of chance events, driven often by a need to maintain a perception of personal control.
Take the case of being involved in a motor vehicle accident that was not your fault, yet radically alters your career due to the injuries suffered. Reasoning that it was the drivers choice to drive that day or take that route, or even to sit stationary at the traffic lights when a truck hit the car from behind, is hardly very useful or even plausible as an explanation of the events.
Optimism is an important aspect of capitalizing on the positive chance events. It is an important part of opportunity awareness – a component of Luck Readiness – (see Pryor & Bright, 2011, Chaos Theory of Careers, Routledge). The Chaos Theory of Careers changes the emphasis in career coaching and life coaching away from purely prediction and control, and emphasises contingency, opportunity, optimism, resilience and the limits of predictability and personal control.
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