If you are just getting started or stalled out, find a blueprint and run with it. Blueprint? Yes, look for a blueprint that covers the next steps for you. For instance, if you want to write your first novel, get one of those books that tell people how to write a novel in 30 days, 90…
Category: Unstuck People Do This
What Unstuck People Do and Think
Beginner’s Mind, Constant Companion
Painful. Beginner’s mind is painful. We are swamped with self-doubt, uncertainty if we are doing things right, uncertain if we even know what to do next. But that is just the way things go. Being a beginner is being a beginner. We feel out of sorts most of the time, whether we are doing things…
Tackling U.F.O.s
I learned recently from Suzy, a student in one of my The Stuck Creative classes, that all quilters try to push the thought of U.F.O.s out of their minds. Otherwise, going on would just be too disturbing. U.F.O.s , as quilters know them, are Un Finished Objects. Yes, unfinished objects can truly haunt us. There…
Breathe Your Inner Troublemakers Away
We all face a host of inner troublemakers that include: The Inner Critic The Inner Type A Personality Self-Doubt Low Frustration Tolerance Fear Worry Psychotherapy gives us a method to get a grip on these guys when they come up and stop us from working: Take a deep belly breath – That’s right (how simple),…
The Checklist, Please
You are being bombarded with all sorts of things that have little direct relationship to your Creative life, right? You really get knocked off your path when things come along. Sound familiar? We previously defined some of these forces as distractions, dips, and dives. Today we go beyond definitions to actual practices for bouncing back…
If You Fail Today, Succeed Tomorrow
Let’s say you have all the intention in the world to paint 45 minutes, 6 days a week. You hit this target just fine for a few days but by the fourth day, some distraction (big or small) comes up and you just can’t get your work done. When we don’t meet our creative daily…
Workshops as Islands
I give credit to A. from Alexandria who suggested this at a recent The Stuck Creative Meetup. Even when A. is at her busiest and life is crazy with demands from other people, she makes sure she is scheduled to take a workshop a few times each year. Once she is off at the workshop,…
How Is Your Vision?
There are two major ways to get somewhere: leave most of your options open and stumble forward or narrow your options and move forward at a good pace. While there are plenty good arguments for leaving your options open (i.e. discovery), we will save that approach for a later post. To move forward at a…
Call Me Rejection – Now Famous Writers Who Were Told “No!”
If there is one area in which a Stuck Creative should consider staying stuck it is keeping on, keeping on. We have heard the stories of people going on in the face of rejection and they are good teaching tales we should remember and turn to when facing our own rejections. Here are examples of…
From Distracted Mind to Creative Mind
Eric Maisel on getting a grip on our “monkey mind” so that we can handle distractions and diversions. Quiet monkey. Loud creativity. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpEBWU3Z9H0&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Casual or Committed Creative? Which are you?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The big decision you have to make is: Do you want to be a Casual Creative or a Committed Creative? Being either is fine but the choice needs to be made. A Casual Creative is the person who enjoys creativity and creative things such as recent and obscure movies, new authors,…
Five Minutes of Creative Work…Are You Serious?
Although I discussed the issue of grabbing time where you find it before, I’ve got to talk about it one more time. One of the first principles I teach in group and individual creativity coaching is that we can’t wait for large swaths of time to begin our projects. This is true of everyone with…
Why Does This Have to Be So Hard?
Creating and sustaining a creative life is tough for two major reasons. First, it requires daily consciousness of what the heck you are doing, where you want to go, and focus on what to do next. This feels so different than the other parts of our life that require no brains. Think of how it…
Don’t Be Afraid To Make A Mess
Here, Eric Maisel, the father of creativity coaching, reminds us that we must mess our way to success. . [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ShSVdCl7pY&hl=en_US&fs=1&] See Eric Maisel’s books in The Stuck Creative store.
A Three Pipe Problem
“It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.” – Sherlock Holmes Holmes had his ritual for digging into difficult problems caused by the London criminal element. Sit in one’s thinking chair, pull out the pipe, load it up, smoke, and tell Watson to shut…