Get Projects Started…and…Done!
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),…
According to the organization for professional trainers, the American Society of Training and Development, we can’t do everything alone. The following stats reflect a person’s likelihood of completing a project: -If you hear an idea (or I suspect, think up an idea), you have a 10% chance of turning it into a project. -If you…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
How you handle the inevitable distractions, dips, and dives of life determines if you can get unstuck and stay unstuck. Distractions are the little things we can live with and without. Watching one rerun of Seinfeld or House, M.D. is o.k. but if you make watching a weekend marathon a priority ahead of your creative…
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…
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&]
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,…
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…
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…
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.
“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…
Step back and look at your creative space. Open your eyes and take a fresh look. See it from new angles. Look past what you already know (it’s cluttered) and look for fresh information. What do you need in your creative space this new year to move you deeper and forward in your work? How…