learning to manage your creativity is like herding cats
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The devil’s propensity for details pokes specifically at perfectionists. The details of any project are the perfectionist’s easy target. Let’s dot each i and cross each t and for heaven’s sake let’s make sure the apostrophes line up just so. Can you relate to this vision of hell?
I’ve written about perfection before, and recently my [...]
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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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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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Winding up Week 9 of The Artist’s Way creativity program, we look again at how to break through artistic or creative blocks, now from the perspective of how we convince or trick ourselves into thinking that staying blocked — by anger/resentment or fear/resistance — can pay off.
Name your Blocks
For creative people, there are many reasons [...]
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Just when you think you have seen or read just about everything, along comes a TGIF “special” with attitude. And an abundance of creatively emphatic quotes. Enjoy!
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According to Julia Cameron, many creative people spend years mislabeling themselves. When we do not create the way we think we should, we label ourselves lazy when in fact we are blocked by fear. The way past fear, asserts Cameron, is through love for your inner artist. Your inner artist is like a child in [...]
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“Filling the form” means to respect the creative process by making the commitment each day to take the next required step, and then the next step after that. We simply make small changes and take small actions right now where we are, with what we have available, to ultimately shift the trajectory of our creative [...]
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In Chapter 8 of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron labels the belief “I’m too old to create” excuse a “Great Block Lie” and considers it on a par with that other old saw, “I don’t have money for it.” Using the “too old” excuse is so convenient. And the longer you wait to begin, [...]
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According to Julia Cameron, we need to take the pain of artistic losses or failures and ask: “How does this loss serve me? Where does it point my work?” What if you could turn that pain into creative energy to recover and keep moving forward? What if you could use a painful creative loss [...]
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