If you haven’t read the old 80’s era creativity book, A Whack on the Side of the Head: How to Unlock your Mind For Innovation by Silicon Valley creativity guru Roger von Oech, you should. As von Oech describes it, the book explains how you can engage in mental sex – meaning “sex of our […]
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 […]
You know how you come back from vacation or the weekend at the same time relaxed but also all jazzed up and ready to roll? And then you re-enter the routine of daily life and the energy seeps out of your being until you are right back where you started with the same sapped-out feeling […]
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 […]
Deep in Chapter 8 of Eric Maisel’s Coaching the Artist Within, we come across a nugget on identifying and dealing with perfectionism. Maisel argues that we are culturally conditioned to value a high gloss perception of perfection over reality. Reality, of course, includes both glossy and matte, highs and lows, successes and failures, perfection and […]
Are you committed to the process of making art, or are you one of those creative types who, as Eric Maisel describes in Coaching the Artist Within, would much rather imagine that other (lucky!) people’s creative projects finish themselves joyfully and magically by effortless genius while you, meanwhile, refuse to get out of bed? Dilemma: […]
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 […]
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 […]
When you think about your creativity, do you think holistically? Or do you reflexively distinguish between, for example, being process-oriented or product-oriented? Do you split personal work from commercial work? Pit disciplined work against the flow of creativity? These are the kinds of dreaded polar opposites or dualistic thoughts Eric Maisel highlights in his self-improvement […]
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 […]