photo credit: sanbeiji

If you want to take your mission in life to the next level, if you’re stuck and you don’t know how to rise, don’t look outside yourself. Look inside. Don’t let your fears keep you mired in the crowd. Abolish your fears and raise your commitment level to the point of no return, and I guarantee you that the Champion Within will burst forth to propel you toward victory.

— Bruce Jenner

This week we’ve munched and crunched a few of our FEARs with four flexible solutions that will work for anyone who’s willing to tolerate a little silliness along the way. From research touting an unexpected Botox benefit – it’s easier to be happy when you can’t frown – to reliving a trip to the dentist in living color, we’ve jittered among our funky fears and found funny fixes for getting unstuck and for getting to fear-less.

In Monday’s post I linked to research that confirms that a smile can actually make you feel better.  And because I don’t think pasting on a forced smile will suffice, I suggested creating your very own “Grins List”…

Did you do it?  If not, what are you waiting for?  Go for the giggles now so you can produce a genuine smile when you need to fake it ’til you make it.  And if you need more reasons to crack a smile besides it’ll make you feel better, check out Top 10 Reasons to Smile And smile, smile, smile!

Then on Tuesday PattiAnn admitted that she has a “picture problem”.  Please don’t ask her to visualize desirable futures – she just can’t see them. Or at least, she couldn’t until she learned about a technique called “virtualization” and gave it a try.  But did she “try” it on a desirable future???  Oh no.  She intrepidly virtualized a couple of her fears.  So, in addition to threatening to vividly virtualize her fear of flying for us, she regaled us with a 5-Senses visit to the dentist in Getting to Fear-Less.

Read it and then rescue your runaway hormones by “imagineering” a happy time in your life – pretend you’re in a Star Trek-like Holodeck and, using the 5-Senses virtualization technique, create some good happy-times “memories”.  In other words, add more to your Grins-List but this time, see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, and feel it.  It’ll make you happy-more and fear-less.  And if you’re having a hard time with this virtualizing technique, take a look at one woman’s Wednesday afternoon… or savor a clever bunch of kids’ cool apple poems.

Wednesday found me STUCK with a BLANK post page.  Learn all about “moodling” from Brenda Ueland while considering lots of good advice from Martin Luther King, Jr., Moms Mabley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Byron Pulsifer, Lee Iacocca, and Karen Reivich… an unlikely band of coaches who gave me the assist I needed to bounce back and post on schedule.  And if you didn’t come up with some of your own techniques for getting unstuck, you might try consulting 18 Ways to Hack Your Way Out of Writers Block – I’m convinced you have enough creativity to make them work for ANY Stuckness you might encounter!  Or, ponder The Post-Its Project for some visual entertainment that might spur you to new approaches for whatever stymies your ability to get unstuck.

And, finally, if you’ve ever felt sick-to-your-stomach-scared because your inner critic is in your head screaming “you can’t possibly succeed… it’s dangerous out there… don’t go… watch out!” then you will find PattiAnn’s post Mickey Mouse to the Rescue is MUST-SEE reading.  And I’m pretty sure that IF you are smart enough to actually do what she suggests, then you’ll soon be laughing out loud – it’s tough to stay queasy when Mickey squeaks and chants in your head!  Never again will those inner critics haunt you.  And, just in case you’re not as auditory as PattiAnn, here’s a sample of Mickey’s amusing squeak.  Now, I ask you, how long could you take that voice seriously???  Or, if you can’t get a Mickey-squeak-vibe going, just march your inner critic’s words to the cadence of the Mickey Mouse Club March.  Who could listen to those inner critic psyche-alerts without laughing as the used-to-be-scary warnings goose-step across your brain to the wah wah wah waaah of trombones???

We’d love to hear from you… Tell us how you get your inner critics to shut the hell up!