Creative Steps

What is Creativity Coaching?

This post gives a very high level insight into the purpose of Creativity Coaching…

In creating anything, two things are important:

• To have a goal
• To stick to the process

Let’s start with goals: one benefit of working with a creativity coach is that the coach will help you explore what is important to you and work with you to set meaningful, worthwhile goals.  For some thoughts on Achieving Your Goals follow this link.

However, that is the easy one! Lots of people have goals and there is lots of information on how to set goal, but know this:

It is through following a process that you ultimately reach your goals.

The process isn’t always easy, and that’s perhaps the real reason to work with a coach; the coach will give you instruction, encouragement and help keep you accountable to the commitments you have made to yourself and your creativity i.e. they will help you stick to the process.

Here is a list of some common issues that need to be faced on a creative journey (they are all explored in more depth in the Creative Steps Members’ Area.):

• Getting the right reinforcing beliefs, presuppositions and behaviours (module 1)
• Finding the time and the place for your work (module 2)
• Learning how to be present and pay attention (module 3)
• Keeping motivated (module 4)
• Standing on the shoulders of giants (module 5)
• Knowing what to do if things aren’t working (module 6)
• Building positive beliefs (module 7)

All of these dilemmas need to be overcome on the process to increasing creativity.

Know this:
Without following the right process you are less likely to achieve your goals – that’s why some say that the process is more important than the goal

Remember this:
The role of the coach is to keep you moving along the process so that you achieve your goals.

In this way, the creativity coach is a guide on your journey to becoming a creative person.

More about Creativity Coaching

Tags: Creative Steps Coaching Course, Creativity Coaching
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Stop suffering and write the symphony…You have probably seen the classic 1952 comedy musical ‘Singin’ in the Rain‘; the story of Hollywood’s transition from silent films to “talkies.”

In the film, Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor) fears that the change to ‘talkies’ will make his role redundant – he plays the piano to accompany the silent movies. In a conversation with the head of the film company he jokes about his predicament: ‘at least now I can start suffering and write that symphony’.

R.F. Simpson, the head of Monumental Pictures reassures Cosmo. He tells him that he won’t be out of a job and that, in fact, he will now be promoted and will write full music scores. Cosmo quips: ‘at least I can stop suffering and write that symphony!’

Like many of us, Cosmo is a ‘someday one day’ thinker; creative, no doubt and probably talented too, but apparently destined never to ‘paint his masterpiece’ because the particular alignment of circumstances doesn’t quite allow it…yet. But it might someday, one day.

Someday one day thinkers squander their talents and often go to their grave doubting their abilities. They set inappropriate goals and don’t give themselves any opportunity to succeed.

Can creativity coaching help these people? Yes, of course.

A creativity coach would help in a number of ways, for example;

• Get your mind off the masterpiece and on to the work in hand
• Get you into action and keep you accountable
• Champion your efforts and help you understand your own motivation
• Give you the tools you need to coach yourself

A creativity coach might also help you replace all or nothing thinking with a more helpful way of thinking…something that works for you.

For example, when asked by journalist Kurt Loder, of Rolling Stone magazine, if he had ‘painted his masterpiece’, Bob Dylan replied: “I hope I never do”. He is still touring today.

What effect would this belief have on your ability to produce regular creative work?

I am still looking for two more people to help me test the Information-Packed, Multi-Media Online Creativity Coaching Course, Creative Steps, How to Coach Yourself to Increasing Creativity.

Have a look at this link and if it appeals, contact me.

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There is no doubt that some of us experience an urge to create; a very real experience, the absence of which leaves us feeling ‘less ourselves’. But why would that be?  Darwin suggested art has its origins in sexual selection, but is this right?……

…is it all about sex?

An interesting New Scientist article cites studies conducted by Geoffrey Miller at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque who likens art to the peacock’s tail – “a costly display of evolutionary fitness”.

Miller’s studies have shown that when women are at their monthly peak in fertility, they chose creative men in preference to wealthy men (Human Nature, vol 17, p 50).

These same studies also show that both general intelligence and the personality trait of being open to new experiences correlate with artistic creativity. In this way artistic expression may offer prospective mates an idea of what we are like.

But the direction of cause and effect is by no means clear. As Miler himself points out sex alone may not explain the evolution of art. “It might have originated for some other function, and acquired the sexual display function later.”

So what other purpose might art serve?

The New Scientist article highlights other suggestions into the purpose of art, it suggests the following:
• “the drive to seek out aesthetic experiences could have evolved to push us to learn about different aspects of the world – those that our brain’s hard-wiring has not equipped us to deal with at birth” (SubStance, vol 30, p 6).
• Art is “a form of intellectual play, allowing us to explore new horizons in a safe environment” (New Scientist, 23 May, p 44).
• Art is “all about making an object or event “special” by appealing to the emotions through, say, colour or rhythm.” The function of this is to increase bonding and raise collective survival chances.

I am sure there are a thousand other theories. I personally like the idea of us wanting to let others know we exist – a more sophisticated way of marking our territory than a dog would choose!

Anyway, whether there is an evolutionary pay-off or not, what is clear is that some people simply enjoy it! And as we stand here today that is surely enough.

For the New Scientist Article click here:

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I love my job. I’m a creativity coach and I get to work with so many interesting people.

I received an email from one of them today. I followed the live music scene while living in London and became a fan of a young and raw reggae artist. He played alone, or with a single percussionist, and put so much of himself into his performance that you had to pay attention. He got signed up, as I said he would, and life seemed good.

Next thing he knew he had made a video in which he was portrayed as a sort of hybrid gansta rapper / reggae star. He was shown in driving along in a suped up car that somehow bounced in time with the beat! It made the charts (top 20 in the UK) and he was temporarily in demand, the latest flash in the pan aimed at the 13 year old market.

But he looked and sounded lame and he knew it. The power of his live music had gone. The acoustic sound had been replaced with a baseline that was as inauthentic as his media image.

We started to work together again and started to re-engage with his passion. He felt he had sold out; I knew he was still on a creative journey and as long as he kept moving he would get where he needed to go.

He played an acoustic set in London last night. I got an email from him today, “Thanks for the coaching. I can now be myself!”

But it was nothing to do with me, he did all the work.

Tags: case studies, Creativity Coaching
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Do creative people need goals?

Information on how to achieve your goals and the role of goals setting in self improvement can be found on many, many websites – frankly, it is a procrastinator’s heaven. Reading all you can about how to achieve goals will certainly enable you to avoid doing anything ever again.

But do creative people need goals? I am a creativity coach and some of my client’s believe that setting goals somehow stifles their creativity. I’m not so sure. I personally believe that we are at our most creative when we have a need; as they say, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.

It is for this reason that I encourage all my creativity coaching clients to have an ‘end in mind’ when we begin to work together, an outcome for the coaching that represents real success; this should be a creative project that feels ‘too big’; in fact, the more impossible the better!

I also encourage my client’s to set ‘well-defined’ goals because, I believe, most projects that fail do so because they are not defined correctly at the outset.

Here is a quick checklist to help ensure that your goals are well-defined. This will help your accomplish your goal.

1. The goal is expressed in a positive statement: ‘what I want’, not ‘what I want to avoid’.
2. I will know when it has been successfully completed. I can tell you what I will see, hear, feel, do (etc) when it has been achieved.
3. The goal focuses on performance and not outcome. (It is also a good idea to keep it to your own performance. As far as possible keep things within your own control and draw satisfaction from improved personal performance even if outcomes aren’t as you’d hope.)
4. The goal can be started and maintained by me alone? You can only change yourself after all!
5. The goal does not cause me to lose anything that I currently value.
6. It is realistic and unlikely to produce overwhelm or upset the balance I am seeking to achieve in my life.
7. It honours my values and it is worth the costs (time, expense and energy).

However, for all the benefits promised by goal setting websites the plaudits actually go to the doers and not the planners, so the best advice is perhaps to set an exciting, challenging goal and then to go about achieving it.

Tags: Creativity Coaching
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I find that this question is often asked by younger writers who feel that drawing on their own experience is somehow cheating. It can become a serious creative block and so is a great topic for creativity coaching.

I have found that one way to help people overcome this creative block is show example of people who have taken their experiences to make worthwhile art and this next example is fascinating….

I was reading a great book about stress, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky. The book has nothing to do with creativity coaching, but it goes to show that we get influenced by everything we experience (see, hear, touch, smell etc) and it is an interesting and worthwhile read.

The section in question was discussing the effects of stress on a growing body and the capacity for severe psychological stress to trigger dwarfism and it gave an example that occurred in a British Victorian family and shows how great writers use their own experiences….

“A son age thirteen, the beloved favourite of the mother, is killed in an accident. The mother despairing and bereaved, takes to her bed in grief for years afterward, utterly ignoring her other, six year old, son.

Horrible scenes ensue. For example, the boy, on one occasion, enters her darkened room; the mother in, her delusional state, briefly believes it is her dead son – ‘David, is that you? Could that be you?’ – before realising: ‘oh it is only you [the younger son].’

On the rare occasions when the mother interacts with the younger son, she repeatedly expresses the same obsessive thought: the only solace she feels is that David died when he was still perfect, still a boy, never to be ruined by growing up and growing away from his mother.

The younger boy, ignored, seizes upon this idea; by remaining a boy forever, by not growing up, he will at least have some chance of pleasing his mother, winning her love. Although there is no evidence of disease or malnutrition in his well-to-do family, he ceases growing. As an adult, he is just barely five feet in height and his marriage is unconsummated.”

 The book then goes on to inform us that the boy became the author if the beloved children’s classic, Peter Pan.

“J.M. Barrie’s writings are filled with children who didn’t grow up, who were fortunate enough to die in childhood, who came back as ghosts to visit their mothers.”

So, should we draw on our own experiences? This brief story shows how wonderful creative output can have its roots firmly in our daily experiences, however tragic.

It is worth remembering that even imaginative output is probably just the synthesis of various sources. So it isn’t the original experience that we should question, it is how we let it combine with other experiences and take life of its own.

Tags: Creativity Coaching
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Can Creativity Coaching help answer Abraham Maslow’s question?

The renowned American psychologist argued that “we have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle that anybody created anything.”

Maslow was not suggesting that we can all be great artists, musicians or writers, but he was saying that we can all develop our innate skills to enable more and better creative output.

So what holds us back?

Maslow went on to ask: “Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled?” But at Creative Steps we don’t like to dwell on this question: rather than focus on what isn’t working we like to celebrate what is working.

For sure, we want to know why everyone isn’t producing quality creative content that is enriching lives; their own and those of their loved ones. But rather than focussing on why we are held back, let’s ask a different question:

Can you coach yourself to increasing creativity?

Already we begin to feel more positive. And when we discover that, yes, of course you can coach yourself to increasing creativity certain areas of life open up: ‘playing music’ means more than turning on an in-car mp3 player when stuck in a traffic jam; ‘ordinary’ people sell their own art work; the book we all think we can write actually gets written.

Creativity coaching helps us to see that the creative life is not reserved for an elite class, or the children of creative types, or for those with ‘talent’. We all have creative dreams and with the right support we can all realise those creative dreams.

Here are some of the some of the benefits of creativity coaching that my clients have reported:

Overcome creative blocks and negative thoughts
Find time to develop creative ideas
Understand creativity and develop originality
Experience the world more fully
Be seen differently and see yourself differently
Add some spice to life
Develop your full creative potential
Express yourself more fully
Inspire others
Complete a creative dream and move on to new project

Can Creativity Coaching help answer Abraham Maslow’s question? I believe it can.

Experience shows that the problems that produce creative blocks and inhibit creative output are rarely congenital; indeed, it actually takes a lot of concerted effort to become creatively blocked and the more time and effort you expend practicing being blocked the better at it you become! Click here to find out what is holding you back.

So creativity coaching is a great way to start to increase creativity.

If you feel you would benefit from creativity coaching then you might be interested to know that for a limited time my Information-Packed, Multi-Media Online Creativity Coaching Course is offered free of charge!

Unlimited Free Creativity Coaching

Find out more here.

“The key question isn’t, “What fosters creativity?” But it is, “Why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative?” Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think, therefore, a good question might be not, “Why do people create?” But, “Why do people not create or innovate?” We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.” Abraham Maslow.

Tags: Creative Steps Coaching Course, Creativity Coaching
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