Blog

Creating depends on you having a mind quiet enough to allow ideas to bubble up. Your emotional health also depends on your ability to get and keep a grip on your mind: on your ability to extinguish negative self-talk, foster productive obsessions while minimizing...

As we discuss anxiety and anxiety management, we also want to take a look at the thing commonly called “mania.” Mania can hit anyone, since it can be induced by street drugs and by other causes as well as by the dynamics of one’s own racing, needy brain. But I want to...

Most people who know that they are anxious do not make a sufficient effort to improve their anxiety-management skills and, by improving them, becoming less anxious. Instead they opt to “white knuckle” life or medicate themselves with anti-anxiety medication. Your core...

Because artists tend to have fertile imaginations, lots of brainpower, and also plenty of anxieties and challenges, they are prone to unproductive obsessions where their mind gets stuck thinking repetitively about worrisome things. However, this same penchant for...

The creative process, the creative personality, and living the artist’s life all generate a substantial amount of anxiety. The sources of all this anxiety are many: the need to go into the unknown to create, a chronic lack of self-confidence, the difficulty of...

We have to break our habit of routinely and reflexively turning to one of our “distraction addictions” to while away our free minutes. As a matter of routine, and without thinking about it, people nowadays check their email, browse the news online, turn to Facebook,...

Addiction is a grave problem for many creatives. Can they still create while addicted? Many do. Countless creatives have managed to unleash their creative potential while in the throes of an addiction. Just visit any jazz club, rock-and-roll venue, after hours actors’...

The following vignette is from my creativity coaching practice. ** Jack worked in grays. His skies were gray; his fields were gray; everything he did felt like a dark day in winter. Clouds hanging low, a storm coming … his paintings made you want to turn up the heat...

Who doesn’t procrastinate? It’s a natural human tendency, given that the thing we need to do may be making us anxious, may feel too difficult to accomplish, may come with risks (like the risk of failure or the risk of exposure), may involve us stretching in...

Some quotations you might enjoy on craftsmanship, lifelong learning, and the artistic process: + "Be a good craftsman; it won't stop you from being a genius."--Pierre-Auguste Renoir + "If you can handle three elements, then handle only two. If you can handle ten, then...