learning to manage your creativity is like herding cats
From the category archives:
I just read the saddest thing, a post at Men with Pens about “how to bribe yourself to do nasty things,” meaning all the things you don’t want to do as a freelancer. Things like finish an ebook, finish a press release, make cold calls, write a blog post.
Apparently, we should reward ourselves with [...]
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Creative people who wish to create consistently face a double challenge: the challenge of following their dream while also facing a potentially harsh reality and bringing their work to life. Eric Maisel, creativity expert and author of Coaching the Artist Within, highlights the importance of maintaining a focused equilibrium between these two aspects of living [...]
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Many creative people struggle with planning. Writing in Coaching the Artist Within, psychologist and creativity expert Eric Maisel suggests “Five Golden Rules of Planning” to help creative people set their goals and formulate better, more realistic, more effective short and long range plans.
Too often our best and well-intended plans fail – let’s be honest [...]
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As Eric Maisel explains in his expert creativity manual Coaching the Artist Within, anxiety can be a tricky thing for creative people. Sometimes fear serves as a valuable alert, sometimes as a false alarm. But how can you tell the difference? And what can you do about it?
Symptoms of Anxiety
First of all, you must learn [...]
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In his self-help creativity guide, Coaching the Artist Within, psychologist Eric Maisel devotes an entire chapter to Anxiety. Certainly some anxieties are rooted in the irrational, but creative people often experience reality-based, rational fears. What happens, for example, if we perform badly, or our book does not sell, or no gallery will represent us? These [...]
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Although many artists, writers and other creative types talk about “the creative process” as though there is only one, we can actually work with a goal-less process or with a goal-oriented process. Eric Maisel highlights this critical distinction in his creativity manual, Coaching the Artist Within. Working without a goal is way easier. It’s [...]
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In his self-coaching creativity manual Coaching the Artist Within, Eric Maisel offers four specific tactics or strategies you might adopt to help yourself create more consistently and more easily.
“Don’t Snivel”
Stop complaining. Take that time and energy-sucking, self–indulgent complaint/excuse-generating habit and redirect its power and intensity toward doing the work instead. Do you seriously have [...]
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Creating in the middle of things is admittedly not easy and often difficult, fraught with all kinds of risks and fears and do-ability issues. If “Just do it NOW!” doesn’t push you to take action, then you may need to work on some strategies to help yourself get moving. In Coaching the Artist Within, creativity [...]
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According to creativity expert Eric Maisel’s Coaching the Artist Within, we must all learn to create in what he terms “the middle of things” — things being both external and internal constraints limiting what we believe we can accomplish.
Facing External and Internal Barriers
Certainly we must create while life goes on, whether we face limits [...]
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If you are a creative person and you are internally driven to passionately make meaning as Eric Maisel describes in his creativity book, Coaching the Artist Within, then you are a good candidate for developing what he calls “positive obsession” and “mitigated mania” in the course of doing your creative work.
Positive Obsession, Negative Obsession
Maisel [...]
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