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

Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America's Foremost Creativity Coach
By Eric Maisel

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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

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #108463 in Books
  • Published on: 2005-01-18
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 256 pages

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

Customer Reviews

Oy....2
I suspect that if you own anything Mr. Maisel has previously written, this book won't be of much use to you. (Also, if you have a lick of common sense this book might not be terrifically earth-shattering, either). I begin to suspect that there's a cadre for popular writers, like groupies, who go on Amazon and *flood* them with bogus good reviews. Either that, or a lot of clueless people who think simple advice like 'create a mission statement' is just the most profound thing they've ever heard.

Crista, another reviewer, was dead on. Nothing new in this book at all. Some of the stuff is almost cringe worthy--I seem to recall at one point he tells you to hang onto a small pebble and squeeze it periodically? I guess he picked that because red strings were already taken, or something.

For a creativity guru, he also, really sadly, plagiarizes himself. That really damages his ethos in my little Book of Ethics and Character. I swear that his entire chapter on 'centering' is the executive summary of 'Ten Zen Seconds'. I guess in that respect, this book might be worth buying if you've never read him--maybe it's a 'Best of Eric Maisel.' And even at that, it's not that good.

The stories are entertaining, and in fact oftentimes more useful than his dopey exercises, but even that grated after a while. Yeah yeah all of your clients are amazingly successful and it's all because of you...ever heard of a little *humility*, mon ami? On that note, allow me to indicate that the ENTIRETY of his further reading/resources appendix at the end of this minim opus are books written by...Eric Maisel.

Helps Bring Good Ideas to Light5
If you ever thought about hiring a coach to help bring out your natural talent, try reading this book first. It's delivers ground breaking results that will open your eyes to new ideas and ways of thinking.

This Book Is Helping Me Get Unblocked5
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. I was sinking into a state of overwhelm. Now I am doing just about the same things creatively. The difference is that I am excited about what I am doing, I see meaning in all of this, and my gut level passion to reach my goals has returned. I wake up in the morning excited about my day. I enjoy the personal stories, as I can identify with a lot of the personal creative struggles listed. This is my second Eric Maisel book. The first one just did not speak to me like this one. Now I am all fired up, and looking forward to reading the rest of the book, completing the exercises, and increasing my understanding of how to deal with blockages with some solid, workable tools.