learning to manage your creativity is like herding cats
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As a writer, how often do you stop to reread your work and then agonize over what you just wrote because it’s not perfect? How much time to you spend mulling exactly where to start a scene, debating the perfect first line for the fifth chapter, toying with the perfect verb for a key sentence, [...]
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I hate to bring up the subject of creative anxiety twice in one week and then not offer a coping exercise! In his self-help creativity manual Coaching the Artist Within, psychologist Eric Maisel suggests we learn to appreciate what he terms the “Tao of Anxiety” and thus coach ourselves through it.
It is, as are [...]
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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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In Coaching the Artist Within, creativity expert and psychologist Eric Maisel devotes an entire chapter to “Achieving a Centered Presence.” He describes a simple, six-step, one minute process for carefully breathing and thinking yourself into a grounded state of calm so you are ready to create and take the next right step for the project [...]
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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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In Coaching the Artist Within, creativity expert Eric Maisel discusses the mental energy required to create. Unlike physical energy which is based on food/sleep inputs, mental energy depends on your interest, passion, desire, concern – the intensity you apply to creating. Your mental energy is depleted by mental activity, including creating – and not creating! [...]
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According to Eric Maisel, psychologist, creativity expert and author of Coaching the Artist Within, the antidote to self-sabotaging negative self-talk is training yourself to stop the wrong-thinking and start thinking right. In other words, he recommends replacing block-inducing anxious self-talk with affirmations.
You may be familiar with affirmations from other creativity books such as Julia [...]
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In his creativity book Coaching the Artist Within, Eric Maisel insists we need to get a grip on our mind, take charge of our own self talk. We talk to ourselves all the time, and all too often what we are saying in our self-talk is not helpful. We talk ourselves out of creating, out [...]
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