You may have taken a personality survey before.  You might have coaxed your husband into taking a “are we compatible survey”, even though you’ve been married for more than ten years! Or you’ve prodded your boyfriend into taking: “are you marriage material” to try and get him to commit. We’ve filled out surveys  in magazines at the doctor’s office or seen them on Twitter or Facebook pages. All these personality quizzes are designed to tell us what type of parent, thinker, worker, lover or sleeper we are.

However, you probably have not taken a personality survey that tells you what you’re afraid of before. Yes, a fun but amazingly accurate survey called Wanna Play that first reveals your personality type (Innovator, Achiever, Peacemaker or Puzzle Player) and then correlates what you’re afraid of (invisibility, failure,  rejection or chaos).

Why is this important? Because our fears shape our lives. They keep us from reaching our potential and keep us stuck in the same old patterns of behavior that no longer serve us. Our relationship problems keep repeating themselves with the same scenarios but a different cast of characters. I have a history of working for ungrateful bosses – I know this.

Eventually, without realizing it, our unconscious fears lead us to play a childhood game called Hide and Seek, where we hide from something inside ourselves and seek answers outside ourselves. Remember that childhood game where we hid from someone … well now we are hiding from something, some feeling, some emotion, some thought. Basically something called FEAR.

 When we play Hide and Seek, we begin to seek outside of ourselves what we think will make us happy internally. We race to acquire tangible things, such as more money, better cars, fancier toys, and bigger houses. The shininess of the new toys wears off and we soon realize that to achieve happiness, peace or whatever it is you are looking for more of, we have to change something within.

Yes, we still play childhood games, even though we thought we outgrew them. Combine this with the baggage we bring from childhood, and when life gets stressful, when our back is against the wall, fear rears its ugly head and can overtake our life.  

Take heart! As an Achiever who fears failure, who seeks accomplishment at all times and at all costs, who often feels less than and wants to feel more than,  I’m here to tell you there is a way out of this rut. This simple personality quiz can get you to have a new definition of fear  – Face your fears, Embrace your fears, Ace your fears and Replace your fears –   and lead a life where you’re not half, you’re whole!

Take the first step by taking this personality survey. Our fears have no expiration date … uncover yours and put them in their rightful place – the rearview mirror.

Wanna Play?

So as the co-author of A New Fearlesss You, after writing a whole book about being fearless, you would think behaving fearlessly would come natural. True?

False! Sometimes life just stinks. Sometimes you have a day where a pity party is just appropriate. I formed my own Internet Marketing business a year ago and I was lucky to start with two major clients. Unfortunately, today one of them informed me that due to the economy, they could no longer retain my services. Now I know it was a financial decision and not a personal one, but it still stung. Then, I went to the dentist and had my teeth cleaned (I think that is a bait and switch by the way) and found out I need a new crown. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, my dishwasher broke.  Calgon, take me away!

So this dark cloud of fear has been following me all day. If stress is a euphemism for fear, I’m there! How am I going to pay the bills, cause now I need a new client PLUS the money for a new dishwasher and a crown.  I’m glad I am having this mini breakdown in time for National Stress Awareness Month, which is in April.  How timely of me.

So in writing a New Fearless You, my co-author, Evonne Weinhaus came up with a four-step process for overcoming your fears. They are:
1. Face your fears – Face the fears raging inside you that undermine your behaviors. Become aware of the stranger called fear that has coexisted with you since you were a child. Stare it down. Give it a name. Say it out loud and start to bring your fears from the unconscious level to the conscious.

2. Embrace your fears- Embrace the root of your fears by looking at the baggage you’ve brought from childhood. Realize what part fear plays in your life, begin to put it in place, and give it a clearer perspective. It’s an emptying our process, one where you begin purging your fears.

3. Ace your fears – Come to grips with how your Hide and Seek game playing is driving your behavior. Meet all parts of yourself — the good, the bad and the ugly.

4. Replace your fears – Replace your old behaviors that are driven by fear and other emotions with a new and improved game plan, one that re-energizes and fuels the new fearless you.

This gives you a new definition of fear, one that is positive versus negative. Catchy huh? So let me give you the condensed version of how I worked through this problem:

1. Face It. I’m not just panicked over losing one client. My fear is much broader than that. I am afraid that my new business won’t be successful, that it won’t support myself and my family.
2. Embrace It. What baggage do I bring to the table? No one in my family has been an entrepreneur. Both my father and my brother have been in the same job for 20+ years. No one in my family takes risks! We’ve always taken the “secure route.”
3. Ace It. OK. So I am scared to death of failing. I want to be successful. I can’t panic at the first major bump in the road.
4. Replace It. So I have to develop a new game plan. I can sit here and wallow or I can go find new clients… ones that are a little more recession proof. I can join some networking groups, place ads on Craig’s list, and get referrals from my other clients.  

Even after this crummy day, where I am feeling oh so fearful, I can dig deep (and I mean really deep) and try to uncover the fearless me. If nothing else, it quaells the panic and buys me some time to develop a new game plan!

Finally, after three years of hard work, our book is born … A New Fearless You by Evonne Weinhaus and Cindy Smith. It takes a very dark subject — fear — and gives you practical advice for putting it in its place — in your rearview mirror. It does so using games … childhood games like Hide and Seek, Simon Says, Mother May I and Pin the Tail to name a few. You see we all play these games when we’re afraid, stressed out (who isn’t) and our back is against the wall. Fear keeps us from moving forward, from getting what we really want, from achieving our goals. A New Fearless You teaches you how to become fearless, which isn’t so easy to do in these troubled times!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Right now, I want to talk about two people co-authoring a book. Kinda like getting along with your roomate in college when she’s a slob and you’re a neat freak. Evonne is a relationship therapist and the author of two previous books. First, my personal experience with relationship therapists has not been good, obvious by the fact that I am divorced. I should have taken a cruise versus wasting the money I spent on marriage counseling. But that’s another story!

Evonne and I wrote for nine months without even meeting each other. Wild isn’t it? You would think you would pick someone for a co-author that you really knew, that you were positive you gelled with. Not us! I had crafted a website for her before, and we started talking about the idea she had for this book. The topic (childhood games) sounded like fun and something I could get my arms around. The next thing I knew, material started coming at me and I was supposed to make sense of it all. You see Evonne is a stream of consciousness writer and I am a get to the point kinda writer.  She writes in what I call psychobabble and I like to “kindergerize”subjects so that everyone could understand them. No talking about your “inner child” with me! She’s spiritual and I sometimes see God as scarey, stemming from years of Catholic schools and dank confessionals.

In fact, when Evonne came to Denver the first time (she lives in Missouri), I was standing at the airport with a cardboard sign that said “Hide and Seek”, our working title for the book. She had never even seen a picture of me, because I abhor having my picture taken. Another major difference — she is a renowned speaker, has done the talk show circuit and lives to be behind a microphone. I like sitting behind my desk, faceless and nameless working on websites.

I could talk about how we are polar opposites all day long. Let’s just say it worked. Today, we are the best of friends and respect each other’s differences. In fact, we wrote a whole chapter in our book called “Playing Together in the Sandbox” about people getting along. So here’s my advice about choosing a co-author, having spent three years and more time with my co-author than my husband!

• - Choose a topic you’ll both love, love, love, because you’ll be talking about it ad nauseum.
• - Identify early on your “trigger points” – what makes each of you mad or sad and STOP doing it.
• - Identify each other’s strengths and weaknesses and use those to your advantage versus your detriment.
• - Talk each other down from the ledge when you’re about to give up.
• - Choose a co-author that doesn’t snore, because if you go on a book tour, you might need ear plugs
• - Have fun!

This last bullet point is the most important. It’s what will get you through the long nights, the writer’s blocks, the edits and the sometimes ego deflating experience of writing a book!