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

~ Ph.D. Eric Maisel (Author) "The ability to effectively coach yourself hinges on your having enough space to positively influence yourself, to openly communicate with yourself, to carefully monitor yourself,..." (more)
Key Phrases: transformational equations, creativity coach, anxiety expert, Centering Sequence, New York, San Francisco (more...)

4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (26 customer reviews)

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Fearless Creating: A Step-by-Step Guide To Starting and Completing Your Work of Art by Eric Maisel
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The Creativity Book: A Year's Worth of Inspiration and Guidance by Eric Maisel
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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 Description

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.

Product Details

Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: New World Library (January 18, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1577314646
ISBN-13: 978-1577314646
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (26 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #72,423 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in this category: (What's this?)
#44 in Books > Health, Mind & Body > Psychology & Counseling > By Topic > Creativity

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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!

Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
The ability to effectively coach yourself hinges on your having enough space to positively influence yourself, to openly communicate with yourself, to carefully monitor yourself, and to regularly chat with yourself. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
transformational equations, creativity coach, anxiety expert, life purpose statement, positive obsessions, negative obsessions, centered presence, monochromatic painting

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Centering Sequence, New York, San Francisco, Rising Sun, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Virginia Woolf

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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!

Citations (learn more)

This book cites 13 books:

Fearless Creating: A Step-by-Step Guide To Starting and Completing Your Work of Art by Eric Maisel in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Front Matter (3)
The Van Gogh Blues by Eric Maisel in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Back Matter
A Life in the Arts (Inner Work Book) by Eric Maisel in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky on page 93
Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch in Front Matter

See all 13 books this book cites

Books on Related Topics (learn more)

The Van Gogh Blues by Eric Maisel

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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	63% buy the item featured on this page: Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America's Foremost Creativity Coach 4.4 out of 5 stars (26) $10.17
	13% buy Fearless Creating: A Step-by-Step Guide To Starting and Completing Your Work of Art 4.4 out of 5 stars (20) $12.21
	9% buy Creativity for Life: Practical Advice on the Artist's Personality, and Career from America's Foremost Creativity Coach 4.8 out of 5 stars (4) $12.21
	8% buy The Creativity Book: A Year's Worth of Inspiration and Guidance 4.8 out of 5 stars (12) $10.17

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Customer Reviews

26 Reviews

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Average Customer Review

4.4 out of 5 stars (26 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 37 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 (TOP 100 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

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.

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26 of 27 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 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.

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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 (REAL NAME)

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.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Oy....
I suspect that if you own anything Mr. Maisel has previously written, this book won't be of much use to you. Read more

Published 16 months ago by Seven Kitties

5.0 out of 5 stars Helps Bring Good Ideas to Light
If you ever thought about hiring a coach to help bring out your natural talent, try reading this book first. Read more

Published 17 months ago by C. Mitchell

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book Is Helping Me Get Unblocked
I have been working with the ideas in the this book for less than a week, but, already, I seem to have recovered a lot of my lost passion for creativity. Read more

Published 20 months ago by Grey Reaser

5.0 out of 5 stars 1000X better than "Art and Fear"
Eric Maisel, San Francisco-based creativity coach and trainer of same, has delivered the excellent work Coaching the Artist Within. Read more

Published 20 months ago by Kathlene Kelly

5.0 out of 5 stars Dynamic Approach to Achieving Creative Excellence

After reading Eric Maisel's "Coaching the Artist Within," I realized it was not the kind of book that you read one time, reflect on how much you enjoyed it, then... Read more

Published 22 months ago by Author-Poet Aberjhani

4.0 out of 5 stars No More excuses
Our Artists Group is using both Coaching and Fearless Creating by Maisel. We're excited about his no-nonsense approach to creating, good examples of others and really nice and... Read more

Published on September 26, 2007 by K. Jensen

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Book for Self-Coaching
Maisel does a wonderful job of tackling the key issues involved in creating. His book is especially valuable in reinforcing the notion that to create you must create despite any... Read more

Published on February 15, 2007 by bronx book nerd

2.0 out of 5 stars Don't buy it
I have Fearless Creativity this book has the same process orientated view mood about it. Pick up the book "Inspiring Creativity" instead which is a anthology and has views of 22... Read more

Published on February 13, 2007 by Final Fantasy

5.0 out of 5 stars Coaching the Artist Within
As a visual astist I found this book to be tremendously helpful! It is enjoyable to read and offers very pertinent information and advice on many of the difficult aspects of... Read more

Published on February 12, 2007 by Lucy Schappy

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent teaching guide
Eric Maisel inspires us to have the "courage to create," as Rollo May's book is entitled. The insights and exercises he presents have helped my students and me overcome our self... Read more

Published on February 8, 2007 by Jane G. Cross

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