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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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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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 [...]
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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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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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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 [...]
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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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