Capítulo 1
Unlocking Your Creative Potential: The Art of Self-Coaching
Have you ever wondered what separates those who merely dream of creating from those who actually do? One morning, I received a call from John, a well-known musician whose band was falling apart. When we met, I discovered his real problem wasn't his bandmates or label conflicts-he hated his recent songs. With gentle encouragement, he wrote a ballad about his Budapest childhood that eventually became the seventh track on his acclaimed next album. That same day, I spoke with Margaret, a bestselling novelist who, despite her success, felt like a fraud whenever approaching her "serious" work. These creators, like so many others, weren't lacking talent but struggling with the internal barriers that block authentic creative expression.
"Coaching the Artist Within" has become a cornerstone text for creative professionals worldwide, translated into seven languages and embraced by artists from Tokyo to Toronto. The book's enduring popularity stems from its practical approach to the psychology of creativity-a subject Eric Maisel pioneered after decades working with creators across disciplines. What makes this work particularly powerful is how it transforms abstract creative challenges into concrete skills anyone can develop. Let's explore how these skills can revolutionize your creative life.
Capítulo 2
Becoming Your Own Creative Ally: The Art of Self-Coaching
The journey begins with developing enough mental distance to positively influence yourself. This mindful approach requires becoming a compassionate witness to your own life-someone who notices your defensive maneuvers while motivating, congratulating, and occasionally chiding you. Without this inner coach, you remain "three-quarters blind," making anxiety-driven decisions rather than fulfilling your life mission.
The "Chatting with Yourself" exercise illustrates this beautifully: position two kitchen chairs facing each other-one where you sit as yourself, the other where you become your "inner creativity coach." When in the coach's chair, ask probing questions with genuine curiosity about your creative blocks. The key is moving quickly between chairs to maintain momentum and avoid wallowing in negativity.
Most people never achieve this level of self-awareness, choosing instead to soothe themselves with distractions while decades pass in a trance. I witnessed this in Rising Sun, Indiana, at an underattended writers' conference. These weren't cowards; they'd survived divorces, sculpted with chain saws, raised children with disabilities. Yet creative courage eluded them because they feared opening a frightening can of worms-their own personalities, the hard work of creating, the marketplace, and core issues of meaning.
One participant, Melissa, introduced herself as "a dummy" with no idea what book to write despite an itch to create. Through coaching, I discovered she was hiding behind the idea of writing a biography about a famous dancer rather than telling her own truth. When I suggested her own story would be more interesting, tears sprang to her eyes. By asking simple questions and making careful observations, she uncovered a novel idea about a teenage girl whose parents go missing. The next day, Melissa announced her concept without apology-"as if a serious soul had escaped from lockup"-and wrote prolifically during the workshop.
The foundation of self-coaching is deciding to matter. If you don't believe your ideas or work matter, you won't have the motivation to create. Try saying "I matter," "My creative work matters," or "I intend to matter" twenty to thirty times throughout the day-speaking loudly until something clicks and you feel resolved to be significant.
Capítulo 3
Passionately Making Meaning: Your Creative North Star
Making meaning isn't just a skill-it's a way of life that begins with deciding to matter. Choose to lead a principled, creative life in support of your cherished ideals, despite little external support. Announce your intention to make meaning regardless of existential uncertainties, declaring "there is no meaning until I make it."
A complete life purpose typically combines using your talents daily, serving important values, finding satisfaction, working on meaningful projects, and forming loving relationships. These elements create a life purpose statement that guides all your actions. You must then hold this intention firmly in mind and tackle your meaning-making with genuine passion-something most people avoid out of fear.
I witnessed this struggle in Los Angeles with an Academy Award-winning screenwriter deeply unhappy despite her success. Though tempted by lucrative script-doctoring offers, she felt creatively stifled by Hollywood's sanitizing process. She described her passion project about a fourteen-year-old French Resistance messenger during WWII that would end tragically with torture and betrayal-showing real horror that would "make people throw up."
When I helped her see the parallel between her protagonist Michael (delivering a message through enemy lines) and herself (with a creative message that needs delivering despite obstacles), she realized she'd rather face physical dangers than the tedium and rejection of selling her vision. Over subsequent months, despite meetings with European and Hollywood directors who initially expressed interest but ultimately passed, she maintained her commitment to the project while accepting commercial work.
"I'm not actually on the run from Nazis. I can soak in the sun, find some love. But I'm not forgetting my commitment," she explained. Though the movie remains unmade, she can feel justifiably proud of her meaning-making efforts.
To arrive at your own life purpose statement, list your life purposes, rank them by importance, identify which are primary and which are secondary, and then create a single sentence that becomes your instructions for living. This statement will serve as your north star for all future decisions and actions.
Capítulo 4
Getting a Grip on Your Mind: Mastering Creative Thinking
"Get a grip on your mind!" the Buddha said-and there's no more important lesson for creators. Wrong thinking causes needless suffering and prevents us from creating deeply. It appears as self-battering, disguised "objective thinking" that masks anxieties, or as bravado and rage.
We often mask anxiety through linguistic tricks. Eleven common examples include phrases like "I'm not ready," "I don't feel like it," "I don't feel well," "I can't think straight," "I can't do it," "I don't know what to say," "I can't see the point," "It feels too difficult," "What's happening here?", "I do better with...", and "Yes, but..."
Simply noticing these patterns can transform your creative practice. Cognitive therapist Aaron Beck described a patient who felt blue after making mistakes because he would automatically think "I'm a dope" or "I never do anything right." Once aware of these self-criticisms, he recognized their unreasonableness.
After identifying and disputing negative thinking, the third step is replacing wrong thoughts with right ones. Effective affirmations are short, simple, positive, and declarative phrases that redirect your thinking toward confidence or creativity. Examples include "I am fine just as I am," "I am off to create," "I trust my resources," "I am not worried," "I am perfectly okay," "I can handle this," "First things first," "I accept myself," "I am capable and courageous," "I have everything I need," "One step at a time," and "I am ready."
In Savannah, I met a mathematics professor named Martin who had discovered after twenty-five years that his specialty in Elgar Transformational Equations was fundamentally flawed. His life's work had become obsolete, leaving him feeling like "a broken man" who "hated math."
Through our coaching conversation, Martin realized he needed to challenge his wrong thinking. When I asked what truly interested him, he mentioned Bach and evolutionary theory. We worked through his negative thoughts: "I'm too old" became "I'm still young and have interesting work ahead"; "I can't work outside my field" became "Who gives a shit about those categories!"
Martin found his new mantra: "I go where the thinking takes me." He realized he could honorably teach mathematics while pursuing new intellectual passions. Our brief creativity coaching session freed him from his transformational equations prison, opening him to forty years of new thinking.
Capítulo 5
Eliminating Dualistic Thinking: Embracing Creative Wholeness
While negative self-talk undermines creativity, equally destructive is dualistic thinking-the habit of seeing creative choices as either/or propositions. We have powerful reasons both for creating (using our potential, connecting to dreams, intellectual richness) and for not creating (real work, anxiety, possibility of mistakes). Most people let the negatives outweigh the positives and avoid creating altogether or choose easy, manageable projects that don't do justice to their talents.
Those who opt for the fully creative life must combat the powerful anti-creating forces that arise from within themselves, their culture, and simply being alive. One crucial strategy is refusing to take sides in creative dualities like process versus product, simplicity versus complexity, or discipline versus flexibility. Instead, the creative person must accept both parts of each pair and understand the value of each in the creative process.
People often use abstract distinctions to excuse themselves from doing what they need to do, using language to manage anxiety and avoid their work. Whether discussing process versus product, personal versus commercial, or any other duality, these distinctions become excuses for not creating. The key is to focus on what the work requires rather than hiding behind philosophical positions.
To embrace dualities, start by listing pairs like attachment/detachment, process/product, personal/commercial, work/play, discipline/flexibility. For each pair, affirm that both principles are available to you and that you honor both equally. When you say "personal and commercial are both available to me," you're acknowledging your desire for personal work while recognizing the marketplace realities.
Building on this, practice breaking the habit of framing matters in terms of pairs. Instead of asking "Should I be disciplined or spontaneous?" ask "What does my work require?" Rather than debating fiction versus nonfiction, simply ask "What shall I write?" This shift brings profound change, allowing you to make decisions based on an integrative, holistic approach rather than being trapped by false dichotomies.
I witnessed this transformation with Mark, a musician who needed to embrace both his yin and yang energies to start his band. After identifying that he needed to step into yang leadership, Mark successfully interviewed six guitar players at his ostrich farm. Despite his initial fear, he found the process enjoyable. The day demonstrated his growth beyond dualistic thinking-he created a balanced approach with both yin elements (making ostrich egg frittata) and yang elements (setting clear rules for the interviews).
Capítulo 6
Generating Mental Energy: Fueling Your Creative Fire
Mental energy-distinct from physical energy-powers our creative work but is often misunderstood. While physical energy comes from calories and nutrients, mental energy stems from interest, passion, and meaning-making. Many aspiring creators have abundant energy for hobbies but feel depleted when facing their creative work.
The relationship between mental energy and creativity is complex. Depression drains energy while passion boosts it. Meaninglessness depletes us; meaningful pursuits energize us. Counterintuitively, mental energy can manifest in surprising ways-the anorexic expends tremendous mental energy resisting food, while the hyperactive child given Ritalin (a stimulant) calms down because mental stimulation reduces physical restlessness.
To understand your personal mental energy patterns, explore three fundamental questions: what generates it, what saps it, and what replenishes it. Consider concepts like desire, fear, courage, curiosity, doubt, hope, passion, complexity, and clarity as potential factors.
One powerful technique for generating mental energy is cultivating positive obsession about your creative project through passionate self-talk. Bring your current project to mind, then speak to it with intense enthusiasm: "You fascinate me," "I am dying to work on you," "I'm going to think about you day and night," "Full speed ahead!" This passionate approach instantly generates the mental energy necessary for creative work.
In Vienna, I contemplated Beethoven and the dynamics of human energy, illustrating the concept of "mediated mania" through a hypothetical painter named Mary. Mary exhibits classic manic symptoms-decreased sleep, racing thoughts, heightened energy, risk-taking, self-absorption-not as pathology but as the natural consequence of intense creative engagement.
We should reclaim "mania" from clinical pathology and recognize it as the necessary energy that fuels meaning-making. The crucial distinction is between "mediated mania," where the creator maintains sufficient control despite hurtling at breathtaking speed, and "unmediated mania," where one crashes and cracks. Beethoven exemplifies this creative mania-composing multiple works simultaneously, running for hours through inhospitable terrain, shifting rapidly between gaiety and rage. His genius came with significant interpersonal costs, making him "a master, of course, and also something of a monster."
Capítulo 7
Creating in the Middle of Things: Embracing Life's Chaos
People never create in a vacuum-they're always embedded in particular cultures, personalities, and circumstances with countless worries, distractions, and pressures. The inescapable reality is that we must learn to create "in the middle of things" or we simply won't create at all.
History's great creators exemplify this necessity: Newton developed calculus while fleeing the plague; Dostoyevsky wrote while his wife was dying; Shostakovich composed war symphonies amid Stalin's terror and Nazi invasion. Even ordinary disruptions-marital spats, self-doubt, or simple daily distractions-can halt creative work if we let them.
Most people fail this challenge by not creating at all, letting a thousand different things defeat them. Others make the mistake of violently withdrawing from life, creating in isolation but paying the high cost of alienation and unhappiness. A third poor approach is sporadic creation-only working when inspiration strikes, which leaves potential unfulfilled and creates long stretches of disappointment.
The better approach combines skills we've been discussing: getting a grip on your mind, honoring your life mission, making meaning intentionally, generating creative fires, and becoming your own creativity coach. Practical strategies include "suit up and show up" (showing up to write regardless of how you feel), "don't snivel" (cutting off complaints to free energy), "avoiding anticipation" (starting without expectations), and "imagining a flawless ignition system" (visualizing an effortless creative start).
Learn to drop everything to create-drop your resistance, doubts, nagging to-do lists, and all reasons why your efforts don't matter. Drop everything as instinctively as you would drop your parcels if your child got hurt. This practice means taking your creative impulses seriously enough to act on them immediately.
In wintry Manhattan, I observed a writer in Washington Square Park who embodied creating in the middle of things. Despite the bitter cold, he sat on a wet bench, using his sandwich bag as protection, wiping his greasy hands on his pants to capture a thought in his portfolio. This nonchalance toward messiness is characteristic of those who actually create-what's in their mind matters more than what's on their hands.
I recall my client Harry, a knowledgeable film buff who never wrote his screenplay because of his fastidiousness. Disturbed by seeing a successful screenwriter wipe chicken-wing grease on expensive pants to capture an idea, Harry recognized his own paralysis. Our chicken-wing therapy session helped him start writing about Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, but his mother's obsession with cleanliness had so deeply shaped him that he eventually abandoned his work.
Capítulo 8
Achieving a Centered Presence: Finding Calm in Creative Storms
To create in the middle of things, you must learn to achieve a calm, centered presence even when feeling scattered, rushed, worried, depressed, anxious, or off-kilter. The Centering Sequence-a six-breath, six-thought, one-minute technique-can help you grow calm and centered at will.
Begin by becoming aware of your breathing and learning to breathe deeply, filling your lungs completely on the inhale, pausing slightly, and exhaling fully. Practice dividing phrases between inhale and exhale, stretching words to fill each breath container completely. The six steps of the Centering Sequence (CENTER) are: Come to a complete stop, Empty yourself of expectations, Name your work, Trust your resources, Embrace the present moment, and Return with strength.
To practice the Centering Sequence, first decide what "work" you'll name in step three. Then, with eyes closed if possible, take six long breaths while thinking the six phrases divided between inhale and exhale: "I am completely/stopping," "I expect/nothing," your chosen work phrase, "I trust/my resources," "I embrace/this moment," and "I return/with strength." Practice several times, paying attention to breath quality and length. Notice how you feel afterward-if more grounded and centered, you now have this straightforward technique available whenever needed.
From my desk overlooking San Francisco Bay at sunrise, I communicate with two hundred volunteer subjects practicing the Centering Sequence worldwide. Through email, I send daily lessons to artists in Berlin, Bangkok, Boise, Buenos Aires. Today's lesson focuses on "coming to a complete stop"-addressing our perpetual flight from responsibilities, worries, and painful truths about unfulfilled dreams.
The volunteers share profound insights about their experiences: Katherine in Maine confronts lifelong trauma and running from herself; Kristin in Queens struggles with the compulsion to "get things done"; Sam in Atlanta realizes his baseless feeling that everything good will evaporate if he stops; Gabriella in Rome fears that stopping completely might be like dying; Jody describes finding peace in her cabin after leaving her unfulfilling career; and Susan in Oakland battles her "monkey mind." Around the world, hundreds attempt to center themselves, achieve presence, and create art-a connection only possible through the Internet, allowing me to communicate globally from my desk as the morning fog lifts over the Oakland hills.
Capítulo 9
Committing to Goal-Oriented Process: Embracing the Creative Journey
You begin writing a novel with enthusiasm, but soon "resignation sets in," as Virginia Woolf put it. You realize your novel won't simply flow from your muse. Sometimes hating your work is part of the process-not a cosmic joke but reality. You must accept this truth and say, "I can do this even though it hurts," rather than fantasizing that other writers create masterpieces effortlessly. Much of the time, you won't be pleased with your work. Embrace that! Stop wishing reality were more like a pleasant dream.
There are two profoundly different approaches: "goal-less process" and "goal-oriented process." Many choose the easier goal-less process, like admiring whatever grows in an untended garden. This passive approach is captured in phrases like "everything happens for a reason." But if you need your garden to feed your family, you must actively cultivate it-removing bamboo and crabgrass, learning what your soil supports, and working hard to grow what you need. Similarly, creativity requires commitment to goal-oriented process.
At the Paris Writers Workshop, I learned a creative lesson watching a vendor insist customers use scoops rather than cherry-picking the best apricots. This perfectly illustrates how creative people must "take the bad with the good"-writing bad paragraphs alongside good ones is part of honoring the process. American perfectionism prevents many from creating at all.
On the workshop's final day, walking home across Paris, I was struck by an idea and stopped to capture it-honoring the process means organizing your material, making mistakes, loving your work in the morning and hating it by evening, but persevering through it all.
Capítulo 10
Becoming an Anxiety Expert: Mastering Creative Fear
Anxiety prevents us from creating well and sometimes from creating at all. Would-be creators are stymied more by anxiety than any other factor, causing them to choose safer paths over artistic ones. But what is anxiety? While often defined as irrational fear, creative anxiety is actually quite rational-the fear of negative consequences from performing poorly, failing to sell your work, or facing a blank canvas has real foundations.
Sometimes anxiety serves as a "gift of fear" when warning us away from misguided creative directions. Other times it's a "curse of fear" when it blocks necessary steps in our artistic growth. Anxiety itself isn't the enemy-it's simply our early warning system against threats. The key is learning to evaluate these warnings rather than reflexively reacting to uncomfortable feelings. Ignoring all warnings leads to recklessness; heeding all warnings leads to creative paralysis.
The first vital step in becoming an anxiety expert is gaining anxiety awareness. We often defend against recognizing our anxiety through linguistic trickery, telling ourselves we're tired, bored, confused, restless, depressed or unwell, when we're actually anxious. To become an anxiety expert, keep an anxiety awareness journal to track how anxiety manifests in your body and what situations provoke it.
In London, I met with Andrew, a British journalist on a prestigious fellowship who couldn't commit to writing a book despite having ideas for seventy-three of them. His anxiety manifested as frenetic idea-hopping-islands, bees, odd jobs-never settling on one long enough to begin. When he mentioned writing about "what it is like to be thought of as gay when in fact you are not gay" in a working-class northern English city, I recognized authenticity and insisted, "Write this book."
Andrew resisted, wanting more research, more options. His anxiety-management strategy was simply changing the subject whenever discomfort arose. I explained he must find effective anxiety-management techniques-breathing, meditation, cognitive approaches-rather than avoiding the anxiety of potentially writing a bad book. His best hope was to own his anxiety rather than ignore it, and through that ownership begin to master it.
Capítulo 11
Planning and Doing: From Dreams to Reality
At some point, you must actually do the creative work you say you want to do, rather than merely wishing for it or making excuses. You must bite the bullet and create, even if that means making mistakes, falling short, and hurting your heart in the process. While you won't technically fail at writing a novel if you do no writing, in the larger sense, you will have failed utterly.
Planning is essential despite our history of broken resolutions and abandoned goals. We must overcome the shame, regret, and disappointment that block us from taking action, and move into an affirmative stance. The key is to create simple, flexible, sensible plans that fit your personal style and to revisit them regularly.
Have a heartfelt conversation with yourself about your willingness to plan, acknowledging past failures but moving toward genuine commitment. Follow five golden rules: keep your current project plan simple (like "write every day"); create a flexible long-term plan with clear markers; ensure your long-term plan is sensible rather than wishful; make plans that fit your personal style; and revisit your plans frequently to monitor progress and make adjustments. Planning creates a container that holds your creative work and helps forge a stronger connection between you and your project.
While presenting at a theater technology conference in Fort Worth, I reconnected with Helga, whom I'd met twenty-five years earlier in Iceland. She shared how our long-ago conversation about goals and plans had transformed her life. After discovering her husband's affair, she had fallen into despair and alcoholism before finding her passion in stage lighting. She explained how making a daily plan became her meditation practice, combining inner compulsion with practical action. Now a renowned Broadway lighting designer, she still maintains her daily planning ritual, ensuring each day includes both meaningful work and small pleasures.
