Creative Steps

Creativity Coaching:

The ultimate life coaching experience

Creativity Coaching was originally conceived to help people achieve more of what they want in their creative lives. Drawing on many of the best concepts of life coaching, NLP and other fields of performance improvement the creative coach acts as a facilitator on the journey towards increasing creativity and assists their clients as they make the most of their creativity skills.

Creativity coaching is distinct to creativity training. Creativity coaches are not typically teaching creativity, they are enabling their clients to maximise their natural attributes. As Tim Gallwey, a founding father of performance coaching, stated: “performance = potential minus interference“, i.e. the coach assists the client remove interference.

Although creativity coaching is concerned with making creative dreams real, it is clear that great creativity coaching touches other areas of people’s lives; in this way it is life coaching with the added benefit that you accomplish a creative goal.

I am a Creativity Coach; I have worked with lots of people who were struggling to find a way to develop their ideas and feelings into meaningful creative projects or who had repeatedly failed to convert their fledgling creative ideas into worthwhile finished work. I worked with these people to find the key to making them more successful creatively and in the process my clients often find that life began to work like it had not done previously.

Here are some of the benefits people have told me about:

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

Although Creativity Coaching is a subset of Life Coaching, could it be that coaching around the theme of creativity is actually the ultimate life coaching experience?

Would you benefit from coaching?

Why use creativity as a focus for life coaching?

Some coaching can be stuffy, backward looking as though it is designed to keep you stuck – it is like some coaches build their business on you needing continual coaching, not on you moving on!

When the focus of the personal coaching is in on the real life experience of a creative project you can keep the coaching, fresh, vital and life affirming. You see,

To be your best creatively it really helps to be living fully

and vice versa

To be living fully it really helps to be at your best creatively

In this way personal coaching around the theme of creativity is perhaps the ultimate life coaching experience. Simply said, it is for people who want more out of life.

Do you want to experience life more fully? Take a journey to increasing creativity.

Read on for more on creativity coaching and for some personal coaching tips…

I am a Creativity Coach; my passion is helping people achieve what they want in their lives and to do it with a dash of creativity. I have worked with a great number of successful artists from numerous disciplines and also a large number of people struggling to make their first breakthrough. I have helped these people hone their creativity skills and achieve greater successes – and I have learnt a huge amount about the development of creativity along the way.

My experience shows me that many, many people have talent, but very few talented people have the required level of expertise or specialized skills to succeed in accomplish a creative goal. This is where coaching comes in.

You can learn to coach yourself!

Sometimes people ask if they can learn to be their own personal coach. The truth is that there are many benefits of working with a specialist life coach that you might not get from working alone, however, given the right training and the right exposure to great coaching you will find that you can learn to put yourself more in control of your own creative output. So, yes, you can learn to coach yourself towards increasing creativity!

Some personal coaching tips

Allow yourself time: One of the great benefits of structured life coaching is that it forces people to dedicate time to themselves and what they want to achieve. Simply learning how to find a time and a place for your own creativity is a great first step to fulfilling a creative dream.

Pay attention: be gentle with yourself and pay attention to both the world around you and the world within you. Learning how to pay attention and understanding that you get what you concentrate on can be life changing.

Keep motivated: easier said than done, we understand that, but knowing how you are motivated might help you keep motivated. Learning self-leadership techniques undoubtedly helps too, as does keeping the end on mind.

Focus on the outcome: Without an outcome you are more likely to be ‘blown off course’. It also helps to have deadlines to work to; not only does this keep you focused but it also tells you that time is passing!

Be congruent: work hard to refine your sense of who you are, and try to align this with your beliefs, your values and your behaviours. Again, easier said than done, but you do not need to do this all in one go. It might help to start to work on your values and use these to guide your behaviour. Then start to look at your beliefs; are they empowering? Do they help you build your sense of self, or are they limiting in some way?

Act on feedback: We are not talking about feedback on your creative work – it is probably best to simply ignore the critics; we are talking about the feedback you give yourself. Find out what works and what doesn’t work for you. This is where paying attention to your world within can help. To act on feedback you will need to be flexible in your behaviours. Remember, you always have choices, and the more behavioural flexibility you have the more choices you have too!

Seek balance: The creative life tends to be a balanced life. We need a time and a place for all things and must strive not to overdevelop a single muscle of preference. Balance planning with doing; having with being, wanting with experiencing, dreaming with implementing.

Learn from others: If someone else has done it then why can’t you? Learning from others is not cheating; it is common sense. What ideas for creativity development can you get from someone else? Do they have any great coaching tips?

Know about incremental change: Keep in mind the tremendous cumulative benefits of positive incremental change and beware the potential damage of incremental change away from your goal. Get to know your habits and make them serve you!

Use tools and structures: There are some great coaching tools available and some great teaching structures and creativity tools available, too. Use them, see if they work and make them a part of your life if they work for you.

Think in terms of a journey: Keep the end in mind and see dips as part of the process. Know that each creative journey has many common steps and also know that you are already travelling.

To understand more about this the process click here.

If you want to experience life more fully then take a journey to increasing creativity.

Learn from other people

Learning from others is a great way to increase your own performance. Some specific things you can do include:

• work with an experienced coach
• read case studies of people who have achieved the success you desire
• learn from people who ‘are stuck’; what do they have in common? What behaviours don’t seem to work?

Our studies suggest that there are four core behaviours required to successfully complete a significant creative project. Those who have managed to achieve their creative goals knew the following four things and displayed the associated relevant behaviours at the time of their accomplishment:

• They knew the purpose of their creativity and had a compelling vision of how it would benefit their lives
• They knew the rules of the road
• They knew the importance of today
• They knew how to take the first step

Creating anything worthwhile appears to be even harder for us to achieve if any of these fundamental elements is missing. Do you have strengths in all these areas? Take our quick quiz and see what holds you back.

The benefits of Creativity Coaching

Life Coaching can help you make your dreams real and help you to live the life you desire. Creative coaching builds on this but can also:

• Give you the time and space to develop your ideas and feelings into meaningful creative projects and worthwhile life goals. It is important to have a strong and compelling vision of what you can be, but how do you build this? One way is to work with a life coach
• Help you understand the nature of any negative thinking you might be experiencing
• Keep you on track and accountable for your own progress
• Show you how others have succeeded and help you incorporate this learning into your approach
• Bring tools and structures to your attention and educate you in new ways of working
• Help you move your beliefs away from ‘limiting’ and towards ‘empowering’

Be aware that creativity coaching is not about learning creativity, although you will undoubtedly be given some creativity training, often in the form of tools and techniques to help boost creativity. The Creativity Coaching concept is that if something is holding you back creatively then it is probably holding you back in other areas too. In this way, Creative Steps is a coaching course in which you are learning creativity.

Creative Coaching Concepts

You might call what follows rules for progressing along a Creative Journey; you might call them empowering beliefs; you might call them creativity coaching concepts. Whichever feels right to you is fine, but if we can believe these statements in a way that they drive our behaviour then we will be getting a great kick start to increased creativity.

Creativity Coaching Rule 1: We are all creative and expressive people.
Creativity Coaching Rule 2: The doing is what counts.
Creativity Coaching Rule 3: We have nothing to lose by expressing ourselves fully.
Creativity Coaching Rule 4: you have to be here and you have to fully participate, not the cynic you or the critic you or the know-it-all you. You.
Creativity Coaching Rule 5: There is no failure only feedback. Every experience can be used, even if only to tell us what doesn’t work for us.
Creativity Coaching Rule 6: If what you are doing isn’t working, do something different.
Creativity Coaching Rule 7: You get what you concentrate on.
Creativity Coaching Rule 8: You can improve your own performance by learning how others achieve.
Creativity Coaching Rule 9: Do your daily work.
Creativity Coaching Rule 10: Find a time and a place of your own

To see how to turn these creative coaching concepts into something extraordinary for yourself you might consider creativity coaching, life coaching or simply incorporating some of the coaching tips in this article into your routines.