Making your Creative Mark, book excerpt from Eric Maisel's newest book
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CONFIDENT CREATING
By Eric Maisel
If you want to
live a creative life and make your mark in some competitive art field like
writing, film-making, the visual arts, or music, and if at the same time you
want to live an emotionally healthy life full of love and satisfaction, you
need an intimate understanding of certain key ideas and how they relate to the
creative process.
One key idea is
that you must act confidently whether or not you feel confident. You need to
manifest confidence in every stage of
the creative process if you want to get your creative work accomplished. Here’s
what confidence looks like throughout the creative process.
Stage 1. Wishing
‘Wishing’ is a
pre-contemplation stage where you haven’t really decided that you intend to
create. You dabble at making art, you don’t find your efforts very satisfying,
and you don’t feel that you go deep all that often. The confidence that you
need to manifest during this stage of the process is the confidence that you are equal to the rigors of creating.
If you don’t confidently accept the reality of process and the reality of
difficulty you may never really get started.
Stage 2. Incubation/Contemplation
During this
second stage of the process you need to be able to remain open to what wants to
come rather than defensively settling on a first idea or an easy idea. The task
is remaining open and not settling for something that relieves your anxiety and
your discomfort. The confidence needed here is the confidence to stay open.
Stage 3. Choosing Your Next Subject
Stage 4. Starting Your Work
When you start a
new creative work you start with certain ideas for the work, certain hopes and
enthusiasms, certain doubts and fears – that is, you start with an array of
thoughts and feelings, some positive and some negative. The confidence you need
at that moment is the confidence that you
can weather all those thoughts and feelings and the confidence to go into the unknown.
Stage 5. Working
Once you are
actually working on your creative project, you enter into the long process of
fits and starts, ups and downs, excellent moments and terrible moments – the
gamut of human experiences that attach to real work. For this stage you need
the confidence that you can deal with
your own doubts and resistances and the confidence that you can handle whatever the work throws at
you.
Stage 6. Completing
At some point
you will be near completing the work. It is often hard to complete what we
start because then we are obliged to appraise it, learn if it is good or bad,
deal with the rigors of showing and selling, and so on. The confidence required
during this stage is the confidence to weather
the very ideas of appraisal, criticism, rejection, disappointment and
everything else that we fear may be coming once we announce that the work is
done.
Stage 7. Showing
A time comes
when we are obliged to show our work. The confidence needed here is not only
the confidence to weather the ideas
of appraisal, criticism, and rejection but the confidence to weather the reality of appraisal, criticism, and
rejection. Like so many other manifestations of confidence, the basic
confidence here sounds like “Bring it on!” You are agreeing to let the world do
its thing and announcing that you can survive any blows that the world
delivers.
Stage 8. Selling
A confident
seller can negotiate, think on her feet, make pitches and presentations,
advocate for her work, explain why her work is wanted, and so on. You don’t
have to be over-confident, exuberant, over the top – you simply need to get
yourself to the place of being a calmly
confident seller, someone who first makes a thing and then sells it in a
business-like manner.
Stage 9: New Incubation and Contemplation
While you are
showing and selling your completed works you are also incubating and
contemplating new projects and starting the process all over again. The
confidence required here is the confident belief that you have more good ideas in you. You want to confidently
assert that you have plenty more to say and plenty more to do – even if you
don’t know what that “something” is quite yet.
Stage 10: Simultaneous and Shifting
States and Stages
I’ve made the
creative process sound rather neat and linear and usually it is anything but.
Often we are stalled on one thing, contemplating another thing, trying to sell
a third thing, and so on. The confidence needed throughout the process is the quiet, confident belief that you can
stay organized, successfully handle all of the thoughts and feelings going on
inside of you, get your work done, and manage
everything. This is a juggler’s confidence—it is you announcing, “You bet
that I can keep all of these balls in the air!”
Manifest
confidence throughout the creative
process. Failing to manifest confidence at any stage will stall the
process. It isn’t easy living the artist’s life: the work is taxing, the
shadows of your personality interfere, and the art marketplace if fiercely
competitive. If you learn some key ideas, for instance that you must act
confidently whether or not you feel confident, you give yourself the best
chance possible for a productive and rewarding life in the arts.
**
Eric Maisel is the author of Making Your Creative Mark
and twenty other creativity titles including Mastering Creative Anxiety, Brainstorm, Creativity for Life, and Coaching the
Artist Within. America’s foremost creativity coach, he is widely known
as a creativity expert who coaches individuals and trains creativity coaches
through workshops and keynotes nationally and internationally. He has blogs on
the Huffington Post and Psychology Today and writes a column for Professional
Artist Magazine. Visit him online at http://www.ericmaisel.com.
The following article was adapated and posted with permission from the new book Making Your Creative Mark ©2013 by Eric Maisel. Published with permission of New World Library http://www.newworldlibrary.com
Click here to win a free creativity coaching session with Eric Maisel: http://bit.ly/16Q0DPc
