Mastering Creative Anxiety

In his decades as a psychotherapist and creativity coach, Eric Maisel has found a common thread behind what often gets labeled "writer's block," "procrastination," or "stage fright." It's the particular anxiety that, paradoxically, keeps creators from doing, completing, or sharing the work they are driven toward. This "creative anxiety" can take the form of avoiding the work, declaring it not good enough, or failing to market it -- and it can cripple creators for decades, even lifetimes. But Maisel has learned what sets successful creators apart. He shares these strategies here, including artist-specific stress management; how to work despite bruised egos, day jobs, and other inevitable frustrations; and what not to do to deal with anxiety. Implementing these 24 lessons replaces the pain of not creating with the profound rewards of free artistic self-expression. * Practical insights and proven techniques for overcoming the challenges and fears that plague creators of every kind * Teaching tales that convey effective approaches to creating fearlessly and abundantly

In his decades as a psychotherapist and creativity coach, Eric Maisel has found a common thread behind what often gets labeled “writer’s block,” “procrastination,” or “stage fright.” It’s the particular anxiety that, paradoxically, keeps creators from doing, completing, or sharing the work they are driven toward. This “creative anxiety” can take the form of avoiding the work, declaring it not good enough, or failing to market it — and it can cripple creators for decades, even lifetimes. But Maisel has learned what sets successful creators apart. He shares these strategies here, including artist-specific stress management; how to work despite bruised egos, day jobs, and other inevitable frustrations; and what not to do to deal with anxiety. Implementing these 24 lessons replaces the pain of not creating with the profound rewards of free artistic self-expression.

Make the most of your creative and intellectual gifts by overcoming the unique challenges they bring with this guide by the author of Natural Psychology. Many smart and creative people experience unique challenges as a result of their valuable gifts. These can range from anxiety and over-thinking to mania, depression, and despair. In Why Smart People Hurt, creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel pinpoints these often-devastating challenges and offers solutions based on the groundbreaking principles and practices of natural psychology. Are you still searching for meaning after all these years? Many smart people struggle with reaching for or maintaining success because, after all of the work they put into attaining it, it still seems meaningless. In Why Smart people Hurt, Dr. Maisel will teach you how to stop searching for meaning and create it for yourself. In Why Smart People Hurt, you will find: · Evidence that you are not alone in your struggles · Strategies for coping with a brain that goes into overdrive at the drop of a hat · Questions that will help you create your own personal roadmap to a calm and meaningful life

Eric Maisel’s prolific, multifaceted career is a testament to his profound understanding of what it takes to live out one’s creative ambitions. A therapist who is also a bestselling author, coach (and coach trainer), columnist for Professional Artist magazine, and featured blogger for Psychology Today and the Huffington Post, Maisel is an expert on all that blocks the creative. In Making Your Creative Mark, Maisel distills his decades of coaching, teaching, listening, and creating into nine keys, including Passion, Confidence, Empathy, Stress, and Relationship. Each key’s lesson helps creators implement real solutions to their individual challenges. Whether they are writers, painters, actors, composers, or craftspeople, readers will learn to “unlock” what has kept them from beginning, continuing, completing — and succeeding.

In a thought-provoking volume, the author critiques how the human condition has been monetized into the disease of depression and related “disorders” and offers a powerful new approach that updates the best ideas of modern psychology. Original.

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.

For writers, painters, or performers in any field, new hope for overcoming creative blocks and finishing the art of their dreams. The blank page, empty canvas, or uncarved stone will often fill artists with dread. But so may the thought of finishing, showing, or even selling their work. It is in this "artistic anxiety" that creative blocks begin. With an understanding that could only be gained through years of experience in counseling artists, writers, and performers, Eric Maisel, Ph.D. discusses each stage of creation-wishing, choosing, starting, working, completing, selling--and the anxieties particular to each. He then shows how these inhibiting tensions can be turned to artistic advantages, how truth and beauty arrive in the work of art precisely because, and only when, anxiety has been understood, embraced, and resolved. Fearless Creating guides the reader, whether an experienced artist or someone just starting out, past the pitfalls that appear in each stage of the process. By following Dr. Maisel's exercises related both to the world at hand and the ongoing struggles of artistic life, readers will emerge from this book with a completed work of art and a new perspective on their potential to be a fearless creator.

Employing anecdotes and real-life case studies, a renowned therapist explains how he has helped people achieve their true creative potential by pushing past everyday resistance, restoring lost meaning, recovering from dashed hopes, and more.