when being creative is like herding cats
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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 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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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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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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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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Not doing your Artist’s Way Morning Pages by hand? It’s surprising how many of us really resist this directive. Doing the daily pages and writing them out by hand is an important part of the process.
Author and teacher Julia Cameron gives all sorts of reasons why, but for me the critical aspect is that [...]
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