Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America's Foremost Creativity Coach [Paperback]

Ph.D. Eric Maisel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 18, 2005

Coaching the Artist Within contains a dozen simple lessons. Eric Maisel, a leading creativity coach, writes each one with a novelist's flair, as a narrative complete with examples, exercises, and questions to help readers explore and reflect on underlying issues that may be keeping them from pursuing their urge to create. Topics include committing, planning and doing, generating mental energy, achieving a centered presence, becoming an anxiety expert, upholding your dream, and maintaining a creative life. Maisel has worked extensively with creative people - poets, filmmakers, novelists, dancers - and he revisits some of them in coaching sessions in San Francisco, Paris, London, and New York. Typical are the rock musician who wants to pursue a solo career and the screenwriter anxious to become a poet. Their examples both entertain and instruct, outlining how to discover one's personal muse - and the motivation to keep creating.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Maisel, well known in self-help and creativity aids circles, brings to this resource for writers, actors, visual artists, and musicians--as well as your average Joe or Jane--a lifetime of experience. The author of Fearless Creating (1995) and Affirmations for Artists (1996), this advisor to rockers and screenwriters organizes his latest title into 12 skill areas. Early chapters deal with "Becoming a Self-Coach" and "Making Meaning." Later ones focus on generating energy (even in the midst of day-to-day demands), centering, managing anxiety, perfecting creativity planning, and maintaining a creative life. These "skill lessons" help would-be artists stifle negative thoughts and develop and use scheduling skills for starting and completing creative projects. Each lesson features as examples artists of diverse disciplines, such as a dancer, singer, poet, and painter, and provides exercises designed by the author to help readers incorporate his methods into everyday reality. To succeed in the arts, commitment must lead to effective, concrete action. Maisel shows the way to both. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: New World Library (January 18, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1577314646
• ISBN-13: 978-1577314646
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #321,214 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It might be a Start, February 3, 2006

By 

Conrad J. Obregon (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America's Foremost Creativity Coach (Paperback)

Artists often find themselves dissatisfied with their creativity. Sometimes this is caused by a failure to articulate a satisfactory vision in their work. At other times, it is due to psychological factors that somehow prevent them from creating. It is to this latter condition that this book is addressed.

The author is a psychologist who bills himself as a creativity coach, and has written well over a dozen books about the subject. He says that creativity coaches "help clients to make and sustain meaning. They help creators deal with blockage, self-doubt, anxiety, fear of failure, worries about mistakes, and other issues that deal with creating."

After urging each artist to become his own self-coach in creativity, Maisel urges artists to develop a number of skills, each in a separate chapter, including passionately making meaning, eliminating dualistic thinking, generating mental energy, and achieving a centered presence. After describing the skill, he suggests tools for developing and enforcing the skills. For example, in the chapter on achieving a centered presence, he suggests deep breathing, while uttering mantra-like affirmations. Maisel finishes each chapter with a self-congratulatory story that shows how he helped someone develop the skill he has discussed.

Although the tools may seem a little touchy-feely to some, there is little doubt that some of the tools he suggests work in many cases. For example, many cognitive therapists now recognize the importance of affirmations.

On the other hand, the author isn't always able to provide clear help for dealing with a problem. For example, one of the skills he urges is creating in the middle of things. Most therapists and artists agree that you have to continue at your art, even though there are crises continually occurring. But it's hard to drain the swamp when you are surrounded by alligators. Maisel essentially says, "Suck it up". But if we were able to persevere through difficulties, we wouldn't be looking at this book.

One of the problems with this book is that it makes it seem simple to overcome the psychological barriers to creativeness. It would be quite an accomplishment if that could be done with the help of a book of about 200 pages with plenty of white space and anecdotes. There probably are people out there who can read this little book and overcome the obstacles they face. It is more likely that the artist blocked by psychological factors may, if he or she is prepared to take the book to heart, uncover what his or her problems are. However, it seems to me, the task of solving those problems will probably require a lot more work and help than this book can provide on its own.

Finally, one should understand that nothing in this book will tell you how to develop your vision as an artist.

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, February 16, 2005

By 

Maria (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America's Foremost Creativity Coach (Paperback)

This book is amazing. I'm not halfway done and it's aready changed my worldview in significant ways. For most of my life I've been a blocked artist suffering from depression. Other creativity books emphasize the usual: become confortable with making mistakes, be disciplined and persistent, we could all create freely if we could just let go of our fear of judging ourselves and being judged by others. This book goes much deeper, to the very root of the issue: meaningfulness and meaning-making. The "why bother?" of the creative process. The incredibly subtle ways you might be justifying your own lack of productivity in the name of some lofty ideal. The psychology of creativity. For some of us the creative process in the only true form of therapy, and we figure out sooner or later that our happiness depends on our ability to harness our creativity. What's more, we come to realize the deep connection between creating and living. You might start seeing many other (non-art-related) personal issues become resolved as you embrace the holistic path that Maisel proposes. This book can do for you as much as expensive psychotherapy, and could in fact be a good complement to it. This is not a self-help book--it's much smarter and deeper than that--and devoid of the usual motivational fluff. No you-can-do-its here. No certainties, no happy endings. Only the recognition that you, the creator, have no other choice but to create, why you keep shying away from it, how the creative mind works, what pitfalls to look out for.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Coaching Myself to Success, February 9, 2005

By 

Jan B. King (Marina del Rey CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America's Foremost Creativity Coach (Paperback)

Eric Maisel's newest is a gem. I read it all at one sitting - I couldn't put it down. I don't consider myself "blocked" as a writer, but I learned how to be even more open creatively through his techniques and stories. It was so encouraging to find out how many other people shy away from their own potential, and that by acknowledging what we are doing we can overcome our own blind spots. Maisel teaches us to coach ourselves through the blocks to greater success.