Blog

[Get your GREAT CREATIVITY TOOLKIT today!] This is a strange time for everyone and an especially strange time for creatives, who may suddenly have more time on their hands but who may also be finding themselves too distracted and off-balance to create. On top of that,...

Great artists wax lyrical about nature and find nature valuable as muse and as emotional healer. Picasso wrote of going to the forests of Fontainebleau Palace and “gorging on green,” then rushing home to disgorge all that color. Van Gogh remarked that the genius of...

Guided visualizations are useful tools and a staple of both the self-help literature and the arsenal of tools that coaches and therapists employ. In today’s post called “Tapping into Your Higher Consciousness,” creativity coach Marj Penley leads us through an...

We may feel small, cramped, and contained, as if we were living in a tight box; or we can create a much more expansive sense of self, one large enough to dream, create, and succeed. In today’s post creativity coach Michele Jennae plays with these ideas in a post...

Hello, artists, check this out! The Great Creativity Toolkit is now available! It’s got more than 50 video lessons from creativity coaches worldwide, perfect for every creative person! What does it take to live a creative life? What will help you become the writer,...

I often advise clients to “take a walk by the lake,” by which I mean “get out of the house” and “get out of your head.” There’s just about no better way to solve a creative problem or to incubate a new idea than to take a walk. Many of our great geniuses pencilled in...

Sigmund Freud had many culturally-based, biased ideas (for instance, about “hysterical women”), many weird ideas, many off-base ideas, and many brilliant ideas. One of his very smartest ideas was the notion of “defense mechanisms,” a subject that his daughter Anna...

Life is certainly paradoxical. We can darken our mood if, as we are engaged with a creative project, it isn’t going well. If we don’t like what we’ve just written, painted, or composed, that hardly lifts our spirits. On the other hand, when we’re in a blue mood, doing...

When I first started out as a family therapist, I created a very simple, quick “mindfulness meditation” that I employed between client sessions. Beginning therapists generally find their first sessions highly stressful, because they imagine that they are supposed to...

It is much easier to catch an idea by sitting quietly than by trying to chase it. It is easier to come up with the idea for your next novel by walking around the lake than by banging your head against a wall. It is sometimes more productive to not produce anything new...