Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America's Foremost Creativity Coach
    Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America's Foremost Creativity Coach
    Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America's Foremost Creativity Coach
    Ebook255 pages3 hours

    Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America's Foremost Creativity Coach

    By Eric Maisel

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Have you ever wished you had a professional coach who could encourage your creative pursuits, help structure your efforts, and cheer you on?

    Coaching the Artist Within is the first book to explain the techniques that creativity coaches use to help their clients survive and thrive in the arts. Designed to help any person become more creative, this book offers a complete program for developing the habits that make creating an everyday routine. The book’s twelve lessons and numerous exercises are at once inspiring, practical, and fun. To spice up the lessons, Eric Maisel shares anecdotes about his clients, including painters, actors, screenwriters, novelists, dancers, and poets. Best of all, Coaching the Artist Within will teach you to be your own coach, and the results will transform your relationship with the creative process.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew World Library
    Release dateSep 24, 2010
    ISBN9781577317210
    Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America's Foremost Creativity Coach
    Author

    Eric Maisel

    Eric Maisel, PhD, is the author of numerous books, including Fearless Creating, The Van Gogh Blues, and Coaching the Artist Within. A licensed psychotherapist, he reaches thousands through his Psychology Today and Fine Art America blogs, his print column in Professional Artist magazine, and workshops in the United States and abroad. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

    Read more from Eric Maisel

    Related to Coaching the Artist Within

    Related ebooks

    Psychology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Working Artist

      Oct 29, 2021

      The Working Artist
      1 min read

    • Article

      Unleash the Creativity

      Jun 12, 2019

      Unleash the Creativity
      1 min read

    • Article

      The Working Artist

      May 14, 2021

      The Working Artist
      1 min read

    • Article

      Showing Up

      Sep 13, 2019

      Showing Up
      5 min read

    • Article

      10 Scientifically Proven Ways to Beat Writer’s Block

      Jun 19, 2019

      Many of my writing students share a common complaint: They can’t get past writer’s block. When that feeling of futility strikes (it does for everyone), I reassure them that it’s part of the process and there are many remedies for getting unstuck. If

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Working Artist

      Apr 17, 2020

      The Working Artist
      1 min read

    • Article

      Finding My Own ARTIST’S WAY

      Apr 7, 2022

      Finding My Own ARTIST’S WAY
      7 min read

    • Article

      Living More Creatively

      Apr 30, 2018

      Since the 1960s, roughly twenty thousand papers have been written on creativity. And today, online bookstores list over 22,000 books on creativity alone: how to spark it, explain it, guide it, or find it. Creativity, it seems, is a hot topic not leas

      2 min read

    • Article

      Mark Hearld

      Oct 29, 2021

      Mark Hearld
      5 min read

    • Article

      Create A Writing Retreat Life

      Mar 2, 2023

      Create A Writing Retreat Life
      6 min read

    • Article

      Composing Pro Tips

      Jan 16, 2020

      Mercury Music Prize-nominated songwriter, composer and producer Ed Harcourt revealed his perspective on music making to us this year, when we visited his unique Wolf Cabin studio. Top Tip “I’ve learned new things from writing with other people, and s

      4 min read

    • Article

      20 Questions with Kate Just

      May 2, 2023

      20 Questions with Kate Just
      5 min read

    • Article

      Seeds of Change

      Feb 12, 2020

      Seeds of Change
      9 min read

    • Article

      What I’m Working On

      Jul 24, 2020

      Author of 15 Western and mystery novels What he’s working on: A memoir “When COVID-19 hit and the publishing world ground to a halt, I found I had more time on my hands than usual. My June release, The Return of the Wolf, had been moved out to Decemb

      4 min read

    • Article

      Priscilla Long

      Oct 29, 2022

      In 2018, poet and writer Priscilla Long gave a talk at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Co. celebrating the second edition of The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). She used her pla

      8 min read

    • Article

      Camonghne Felix

      Dec 11, 2019

      No but wait you’re the water—from “Willing in the Orisha” HOW IT BEGAN: In my MFA program at Bard, Ann Lauterbach asked me, “Are you representing or presenting?” And I wanted to see if I could present Blackness both in theory and in practice without

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Coaching the Artist Within

    4/5

    45 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      There is no greater Creativity Coach than Eric Maisel, who understands that we are all our own reasons for not being more productive. Eric is an accomplished and revered psychiatrist, and offers real solutions and activities to help us stay on our best behavior. His centering exercise aids me at my worst of times...but it only works because I refuse not to make meaning in my life due to fear. Eric taught me that!
    • 1/5
      The author mostly talks about how great he is at coaching other people. However, he speaks relatively little about how we can coach ourselves. I was disappointed by this book.
    • 5/5
      Great advice!
    • 1/5
      Review reflects the abridged version!

      I was expecting a Ya-Ya Sisterhood kind of story about four sisters forced to spend 3 months together at the family cottage. It started out that way, then suddenly became a cheesy romance. Horrible abridgement: for most of the middle the sisters are barely mentioned as the plot focusses on the romance (that had no real surprises). Characters had conflicting characteristics, random events (like finding two dead bodies and moving them to a park???). It started off fine, but then got ridiculous.

    Book preview

    Coaching the Artist Within - Eric Maisel

    WITHIN

    SKILL ONE

    BECOMING A SELF-COACH

    The ability to effectively coach yourself hinges on your having enough space to positively influence yourself, to openly communicate with yourself, to carefully monitor yourself, and to regularly chat with yourself. This mindful and ultimately courageous way of being requires that you get some distance from yourself, becoming a witness to your own life, birthing someone who compassionately but unflinchingly notices your antics and your defensive maneuvers and who, from the vantage point of an observer who has a little cultivated distance, motivates you, congratulates you, chides you when you need chiding, and loves you when you need loving.

    This is the first skill we’ll practice, separating yourself into two parts, your ordinary self (with which you are very familiar) and your inner creativity coach (which may prove a revelation). To that end, please try your hand at the following exercise.

    EXERCISE 1

    Get two kitchen chairs and position them so that they are facing each other. You are about to have a chat with yourself. When you sit in chair one you are going to be you. When you sit in chair two you are going to be your inner creativity coach. It’s as simple as that. Pick an issue that’s been on your mind such as:

    •   not finishing your novel

    •   hating your day job but seeing no way out

    •   having doubts about your paintings’ subject matter

    •   wanting to perform but suffering from performance anxiety

    •   tackling your anorexia

    •   being deeply, pervasively bored

    •   wanting to make documentary films but not feeling up to the challenge

    I think you can see that this first step is magnificent and profound — finding the courage to confess to a real problem. We do this only rarely. We may suffer the fleeting thought I am not finishing my novel fifty times a day without once stopping to acknowledge or confess to the problem. We refuse to stop because we believe that stopping would make us incredibly anxious and ultimately result in a blow to our self-esteem.

    We fear that if we stopped to confess we would drown in despair and self-loathing. So we needle and belittle ourselves while simultaneously doing nothing to solve the problem. What we must do is to fearlessly acknowledge the problem. This is what you do in chair one. You sit there and say to your coach, I am not working on my novel. There. I’ve said it.

    Then you move to chair two and play the role of coach. What do you reply as your own coach? It can be something in the spirit of inquiry, something obvious like, Why aren’t you writing? You claim that your novel is damned important to you, so what’s going on? This inquiry is a vital second step in the process. You-as-coachare interested in the why of the matter, just as an inventor is interested in knowing what filament works best in a lightbulb. You sit the reprepared to figure out what’s going on. You are going to bring everything you know about human nature and the realities of living to the encounter for the sake of getting to the bottom of the matter and finding a way out.

    Now you return to chair one, since a question is pending. Reseated in chair one, you mutter, Why? Because the novel is shit. Now you must return to chair two instantly! If you don’t, you’ll wallow in that characterization, hate yourself and your novel, and be at exactly the same place you usually find yourself, paralyzed and without hope.

    Back in chair two you continue: So you say it’s no good. First we need to figure out what that means. Is the novel’s conception faulty? Is it really as boring and undramatic as you fear? Or does it just need more drafts and revisions? Golly, we certainly know how many revisions a novel might require! Have we forgotten that? — or do we think that we should be spared the task of revising? Or is it that it must be radically redone? — yes, I know how much work that would be! First of all, is your appraisal even correct? Do we need to show bits of it to Mike and Jane and see what other people think? We’ve certainly been avoiding doing that. What do you think?

    You can see that the basic requirements for becoming a coach are courage and common sense. As your own coach you ask yourself the most obvious questions and then try to answer them. You enter into real dialogue, you scratch your head, you try things out, you bat the issue back and forth. Virtually no one does this, even though it is clearly one of the best ways to proceed How many times have you entered into real dialogue with the part of you that could coach you out of your difficulties? Today, if you are willing to do this exercise, the answer is, at least once.

    Continue moving between the two chairs until you can honestly say that you’ve faithfully examined the issue you broached. Let an hour or two pass and then try the exercise again, this time without the chairs. Present an issue to your coach and coach yourself to an answer. Begin an everlasting coaching partnership with this simple exercise.

    When you can’t step away from yourself to observe, when you are boxed into yourself, your sight is myopic and your thinking repetitive and stereotypic. You can’t see answers; in fact, you can’t even see questions. Those thoughts and behaviors that do not serve you — calling yourself bad names, not creating, wresting illusory control by bingeing and purging or running marathons — become the only thoughts and behaviors available to you. You become a one-note wonder and the largeness of the universe cannot manifest itself in you. In this very common state you can’t carry on a simple conversation with yourself, a conversation that might begin, Eric, you haven’t been writing recently. Let’s chat about that without getting all anxious and defensive.

    Acquiring this coach-inside, this compassionate witness, this round-the-clock friendly companion and taskmaster, is important beyond reckoning. Without this coach-inside, you are three-quarters blind. You make decisions only because you are feeling anxious and need to decide something. You spend years neither articulating nor fulfilling your life mission. You remain stubbornly uncoachable, someone who takes pride in his or her own small, faulty ways of doing things. It is one thing to reject the coaching of others — that can certainly be wise. But to reject your own counsel? That has to be very close to cowardice.

    The first self-coaching skill you must acquire is the willingness to bravely become your own coach. If you are not willing to take a radical new stance, to have conversations with yourself rather than shutting your mind to your own good thoughts — out of fear, doubt, and anxiety — you will not be able to master the other eleven skills I want to teach you. You don’t need to take a formal coaching course — you already know everything you need to know. What you need is the willingness to coach

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1