Blog

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...

Many creatives are juggling more than just their art and the rest of life. They are also juggling their multiple art interests. How do you find time in a real week to take care of all of your duties and responsibilities, work on your current novel, and also get to...

The Benefits of a 100-Day Creative Project I preach the value of maintaining a daily practice (or multiple daily practices) as the key to living our life purposes and achieving our goals. We do not get our novel written, our business built, or our body in shape if we...

I grew up very much aware of the phrase “the rat race,” which seemed primarily to have to do with men in suits endlessly shuffling by commuter train back and forth between Scarsdale and Manhattan. I intuitively understood what “the rat race” meant and why I didn’t...