Eric Maisel, Creativity Coach and author, "The Power of Daily Practice."

 Welcome back friends to our podcast, Unlocking Your World of Creativity. And today we have a guest who's made a significant impact in so many facets of creativity and personal development he's a prolific writer. He's the author of more than 50 books, including The Coach's Way, Fearless Creating, and The Power of Daily Practice.

He's a sought after speaker and educator. My guest is Eric Maisel. Eric, welcome

to the show. Hi, Mark. It's great to be

with you. And we're stamping our creative passport today in the Bay Area. And Eric, we like to go around the world talking to creative practitioners. And one thing I've looked for is that thread in the study and coaching you've done with so many creatives.

, what is something that you see on the Pros and cons. In other words, what stimulates someone's creativity? And then on the other, maybe what hinders them from really reaching a creative potential?

To start with what hinders them lack of self trust. Self doubt, and that thing that happens to so many people that is stifling of their imagination over time, school, family, everybody wants you to know facts for the tests and draw inside the lines.

And over time many people start to lose their ability to imagine. And so even if they have their MFA in something, they may still have lost their ability to imagine. So that's one of the places of one problematic. challenge is losing the ability to imagine. Another is misunderstanding process, waiting for inspiration, that sort of thing that some people think they ought to do, wait for inspiration.

People who are productive know they have to show up every day, even if they're not inspired. Tchaikovsky has a great quote, which is I'm inspired every fifth day, but I only get that fifth day if I show up the other four. So misunderstanding process, and I think one of the big ones is not getting started until you have some kind of guarantee that what you're about to do is going to work, and you can never have that guarantee.

You have to really be easier with the idea of mistakes and messes than most people are. And it's understandable why people have trouble with the idea of mistakes and messes because all day long we're supposed to get things right. That's a natural human thing, drive on the correct side of the road, pick up our kids at three, do one right thing after another.

And then a time is supposed to come where we have real permission to make mistakes and messes. That is creative time. And a lot of people can't make that transition from needing to get things right to having real permission. to make a mess. So that's about three or four or five of the hundred things that hinder creativity.

What supports creativity? Self direction, the idea that you are the arbiter of meaning in your life, that you get to choose your life purposes, all of those different ways of saying the same thing. You're the boss. If you really believe you're the boss, that you have that kind of self trust, you will be creative.

And then the biggest thing that supports creativity is having a daily practice, because I think most creative people understand that the second they miss a couple of days, months and years vanish. They just disappear. You stop writing a novel for three days and you look up and six months have passed and you're not working on your novel.

The only antidote to that, the only real practical antidote to losing those six months, It's to show up to the work every single day, seven days a week. And that's a high bar goal. Most people can't do that. Most people don't want to think about doing that. But that's really the right way to get creative work done is to show up to it every day.

I want to explore both of these things that you've talked about. I'll come back to the daily practice in a moment. But I wanted to highlight the idea of being right as a hindrance. My background being in advertising and marketing and consulting, clients pay you to have the right answer. And yet they also want to have, this exploration of creativity and have you come up with something totally new and different.

It's quite a conflict.

It's quite a conflict. And that's why most business people are confused by what they mean by the word creativity. They don't actually want creativity in the sense of manifesting human potential. They want Problem solving. They want innovation. They have a different meaning for creativity, but they don't really want to allow for that thing we're talking about, which is let's make a big mistake with our next product.

I

want to be the head of the mistake.

Exactly. So that's not what they really want. So there isn't really a lot of permission for genuine creativity in most, there are some businesses which allow for blue sky thinking and build in the idea that maybe we'll go down the road with a product that doesn't work.

Some companies believe in that some Silicon Valley companies believe in that, but most companies don't want to go down that route of taking chances they like, like the individual creative, they want some kind of guarantee, and they want to be working in a lane that let's call it a conventional lane, where they see other people succeeding, so they know to go down that lane to.

And that's not genuine creativity, following somebody else's lane. Genuine creativity is doing your own thing.

And you talked about the power of the daily practice, which is the title of one of your books. And you're really emphasizing the importance of this persistent, consistent, effort of, exploring your creativity, but putting something down, I'll call it in print, but, on the screen, on your workshop table, whatever your medium might be.

What are some of the elements that you find are these daily practices? How do we really put that into

something practical? Yeah let me, Approach that sideways. What I try to suggest to all of my creative performing artists clients is that not only do they have a daily creativity practice, but that would be a morning practice and that would be the first thing they do each day.

e interpretation of dreams in: 1899

We've been looking at dreams and dreams, but not at the fact that we think in non REM sleep. We dream in REM sleep, we think in non REM sleep, and writers will be writing and mathematicians will be solving puzzles. You can make use of that sleep thinking if you turn to your work first thing each day.

If you go to bed the night before with what I call a sleep thinking prompt, which would sound like, I wonder what Mary would like to say to John in chapter three, that kind of thing. Your brain will have Mary and John have a conversation all through the night. And then if you turn to your work, you can just.

Take dictation. It's right there. The conversation between you just had an hour and a half or two hours or two and a half hours of free creativity time if you make use of your sleep thinking. And that's a big deal thing. And then the third is an existential reason. And that is if you do some real work first thing each day, the rest of the day can be half meaningless and you won't get depressed.

It's important to get to something real first thing each day rather than just errands and chores and responsibilities. And that long to do list. If you try to work the other way around, if you try to get to your creative work in the evening, most people are both too tired and a little blue by the end of the evening.

A little blue by virtue of not having gotten to their real work all day long. So this is a long winded way of saying it's really important to get up and get right to your work. That's Probably the biggest practical or tactical thing that a creative person can do to change his or her life around.

And I didn't want to skip over your thoughts there about depression and feeling the blues because you've really also talked about this intersection, I will say, of mental health and creativity and some of the factors that contribute to that overlap. I wondered if you could say more about that.

It's a very big subject, of course. I'm in a camp called critical psychology or critical psychiatry, where we don't believe in the current mental disorder paradigm as espoused by the American Psychiatric Association and its Bible, the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Love the American Psychological Association.

Number

seven or eight or nine or

whatever. It's a mouthful. But the idea that hating your job is a biological issue that should be treated by pills is crazy. The idea that despairing is a biological issue that can be treated with antidepressants is crazy. Most of the things that make us despairing or sad or get us down are human sized things.

not biological issues, not brain issues, but human issues that get us down. So that's A. B, creative people are typically more existential than the next person and they care about things like mattering or the meaning of life or the psychological experience of meaning or their life purposes, et cetera.

And by virtue of that, they're more susceptible to meaning leaking out of the enterprise of what they're doing. And by that, Yeah, they are working on a novel for 143 consecutive days. And on the 144th day, they just throw up their hands and say, this just does not feel like it. I just spent six months on something that it's not working.

It doesn't feel meaningful. I just wasted six months and they plummet. And so they plummet not just in a psychological sense of plummeting, but in the existential sense of suddenly not having understanding, any understanding of what matters in life. A moment before the novel mattered. Now the novel doesn't matter.

And there's this meaningless vacuum that just opened. There's this void that opens up in that moment. And that's actually a very hard void to fill. If you just, if you think about it, if you've been spending month after month on this novel and suddenly you discern that it's not working and suddenly meaning is drained out of the enterprise, where do you go?

What do you do exactly? That's why I try to sell clients on the idea of multiple life purposes. That is don't put all your eggs in that novel basket. Don't put all your eggs there because you're going to have moments where that basket ain't holding water to mix metaphors. And then you better have that other life purposes life purpose to turn to whether it's relationships or activism or service or something someplace else that's meaningful so that you don't suddenly lose all meaning by virtue of your novel networking.

Yes.

And I think this term of multiple, pursuits and multiple meanings, I think about a guest I interviewed a couple of episodes back, Christina Wallace, who called it a portfolio life, that you have this broad range of interests for one, but not to be so entrenched. in one pursuit, that you forget that there are other things

in life.

That's a lovely way to put it, portfolio life. And also, we need the maturity and the flexibility to understand that our life purposes, that menu or that list shifts over time. There's no reason to suppose that the thing that is number one on our life purposes list at a given moment. Will remain number one tomorrow.

As an example, let's say you've decided that you want to be healthy. And so that's now your top priority for the month of September is you're going to try to be healthy. And then your kid comes to you and says, by the way, dad, I need a kidney. Suddenly that whole health thing flies out the window and now you're going to go under the knife and give your child a kidney.

re not political creatures in: 2012

Maybe we're much more activistic now than we were 15 years, whatever. These things shift according to the realities of the world. And we want to understand that for ourselves, that our life purpose menu or list is going to shift over time.

And have you found these other, this constellation of interests?

Do they feed each other? In other words, I really do want to write the novel. I really do want to produce the film, but I also want to do some of these other things. Can that actually help fuel the creativity and the energy to produce your focused

work? They can if you're thinking right.

That is, you don't want to be saying, Oh I really should be an activist writing my poetry as an indulgence. That is, you don't want to bad mouth your own life purpose choices. What you want to say is I can do all of these things as long as I understand the idea. Of daily practices of different practices and that each one, each I'm entitled to each one of these.

It isn't an indulgence to write poetry or it isn't indulgence to meditate for 45 minutes or it isn't an indulgence to go to the gym for half. These are not indulgences. These are part of a picture of how to live my life correctly. So they do feed each other unless you're not thinking right and you start bad mouthing some of your own choices.

It does redefine that, doesn't it? Yeah, I'm also thinking about what you said about, one day after six months, you realize this is not working, but you don't want to give up because we've also been fed. Don't give up. Don't quit work to the end. You've got to get the work out.

Yep. My, my phrase for this is wholehearted provisional commitment.

Okay, that's a bumper sticker I need to have.

That's a bumper sticker. Because it means what it says. That is, we want to invest in the thing we're working on, but we also have to know when we're done with it. But that doesn't my mantra for this is to err on the side of completing things. Most people don't complete enough of the things they start.

So if there's a choice point between the novel's not working, let me abandon it, or the novel's not working, let me work on it. I would still say work on it. I would still say go in the direction of trying to make the thing work as opposed to abandoning it. But however, if it really is dead as a doornail, then you may have to move on to the next project.

There's no principle to apply here. There's just tingle down the spine, a physiological feeling about what's true and understanding our own reality. Yes. Maisel.

And he has that little voice on your shoulder telling you that you're more creative than you think. I love this, but you're also more than just the the voice for creativity.

You are coaching, you are teaching, you are studying this act of creating. What do you tell people in a coaching environment about their work and how they can, be more creative in their pursuits?

The first is what I've been saying, which is they need to get to their work. So they I need to help them hold themselves accountable to actually getting to the work.

But then the second thing will be anxiety management because most folks don't understand the extent to which little tendrils of anxiety prevent them from getting their creative work done. They don't get the relationship between anxiety and creativity. And there are many reasons why creativity threads through.

Anxiety threads through the creative process. One is an obvious one as soon as you hear it, but it's not obvious until you hear it. And that is that the creative process is essentially making one choice after another. Put a little red here, put a little blue there, send my character to Barcelona, send my character to Paris.

And choosing provokes anxiety. People try to avoid too much choosing. If the whole process is choosing, then there are lots of reasons to never get to your novel or never get to your canvas. And people don't understand the extent to which the creative process is all about choosing and the extent to which choosing makes people anxious.

So it's a long winded way of saying, I have to help people acquire. One or two or three, not even three, one or two. portable anxiety management techniques that actually work for them so that when they're feeling a little of these tendrils of anxiety, a little resistance to getting to the work, a little blockage that they can turn to one of these magical techniques, whatever they've devised for themselves and reduce their experience of anxiety in the moment so they can get to the work.

And when

you think of these choices, we've now laughed about the term FOMO, but if you're really Afraid of making the wrong choice and the fear of missing out, what if I turned left and instead of turning right then you're completely frozen.

That's exactly right. And people don't understand.

There's a second part to what you just said, turning left or turning right in the dark. It's in the dark because you don't actually know whether to turn right or left. If I say to you travel from New York to Boston you know the destination. And when you come to a crossroads, you pick the sign that says Boston this way.

In the creative process, there's no sign that says Boston this way. So you're bound to make lots of mistakes. Sometimes you're going to go to Providence. That wasn't where you meant to get to. And you have to maturely accept, I got to Providence. That wasn't where I meant to get to. I meant to get to Boston.

Let me get back on the road. And

what did I learn from that, maybe?

And maybe what I learned for that, or maybe just, I got to Providence, not where I meant to get. Yes. Too bad I spent two and a half years on the wrong thing. Too bad. That's very hard to tolerate. The thing I just said is easy to say, but very hard to tolerate to spend a long amount of time on something that didn't quite pan out.

And parenthetically, most of our work is going to be ordinary. Not exceptional. That's another place of maturity. How many of Bach's 300 cantatas are superb? 14, 28, whatever the number is, it's a percentage of the whole. For every creative person, their excellent work is a percentage of the whole, and a lot of their work is ordinary.

And that's hard for people to tolerate, to think about, I'm going to start a novel, gee, it may just be ordinary. That's a very hard thought to entertain as you start a big creative project, that there's only a, whatever, 15%, 25 percent likelihood that this will be superb, and a 75% a 50 percent likelihood that it'll be ordinary and a 25 percent likelihood likeliness that it'll be bad.

And

you think about the pressure then on music the artist who says, now I have to come up with a second album, or the movie, the sequel or the next book or the next anything.

And most of those. Historically have not been very good because of that pressure.

Historically, the sequels to things have not been of the quality of the original. And also it's very interesting when you are a success, your audience wants you to do two things simultaneously. Play your hits and top yourself. And that doesn't really work as an idea. It doesn't really work to give them what they're used to, but also give them something new at the same moment.

And fans are fanatic. That's where fan comes from. Fans are fanatic about the things they want. The greatest example of this is Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle hated the success of Sherlock Holmes because nobody was reading his real novels. Just everybody wanted Sherlock Holmes. Has anybody read, you know if anybody has read The White Company?

No. No. So what did he do? Do you remember what he did? He killed Sherlock Holmes. Pushed him off a cliff. He had Moriarty push him off a cliff. His fans so revolted that in the next episode, Conan Doyle had to bring Sherlock Holmes. He had to invent, Oh, Holmes hung on by a thread on a vine. He had found a vine and he climbed his way back up.

But that's what real success is like. It becomes a burden and an albatross. And of course, anybody who hasn't had success wants that. It's not like they wouldn't trade their lack of success for success. They want success. But success. It does bring its own problems, especially the first year of big success, because suddenly you have so much, so many drugs thrown at you, so much sex thrown at you, so much dis, so much disorienting stuff thrown at you in that first year of a big success that it's very hard to remain whatever the language would be centered or grounded or still in your own head or your own space.

When you're talking about Play the Hits and Top Yourself, I think about a live album that Joni Mitchell had, and she was on the second song, and there was a heckler, Big Yellow Taxi! And she's nobody ever yelled at Van Gogh, Hank, Starry Night Again! So performing artists have

this other...

Or Bob Dylan going electric.

The same kind of story, yes. Yeah, exactly. So I just want what I want. I paid to hear this.

That's exactly right. That's exact. So that's all by way of saying there are lots of intricacies to the creative life. It's not a smiley face. It's a wonderful life. It's one of our prime meaning making opportunities.

It's one of the life purposes for many kinds of people, but it ain't an easy life.

Let's speak more about then this coaching program. We've talked about how you coach creatives, but you're really now putting this together in more of a certificate kind of a structure. Does this really help organize all the sort of individual thoughts you could share into a coaching

program?

Yet I'm collaborating with a group called Noble Manhattan Coaching. They're a big European based coaching organization that, that's, they're actually the largest, world's largest provider of coach training programs, and we've collaborated on a creativity coach. certificate and diploma program, which is very robust.

It's got 260 lessons and I think 15 webinars and buddy support and monthly this is, and it's got all the bells and whistles you could want out of a program. And at the end of it, you're absolutely qualified to enter into the world as a creativity coach which is, it's a very wonderful and heartfelt profession to, to be able to sit with.

Create and performing. I, on a given day, I think I was, I think this is a summary of yesterday. I was in Norway. I was in Cork. I was in Jerusalem with clients. This is, it's a wonderful opportunity nowadays with the internet to coach clients from all over the world and all kinds of metiers, all kinds of different disciplines.

Yes, building a practice is hard. All entrepreneurial things are hard. So yes, it's not that easy to make a go of it. But if you do make a go of it, it's a great, it's a great profession and it's a, it's, if you're trying to cobble together a life as an artist. then you might think of doing creativity coaching on the side, being of service to your fellow creatives.

Yes.

It sounds like a great program. I'm going to put all those links, Eric, in our show notes so people can find the program, read more about it, and decide if that's something they'd like to pursue. So thanks for telling us about that. Sounds great. My guest has been Eric Basel. We've been talking about all sorts of insights and experiences he has on, to steal our title, Unlocking Your World of Creativity.

And we've really focused on the lock part, that there's so much that we have to overcome sometimes, the fears and challenges. But I love, Eric, that you've described not only A daily practice, but a specific kind of rigor and consistency first thing in the morning to really tap into the most creativity we could have all day.

Yep. And just parenthetically creatives are more prone to addiction than the next person for a lot of reasons. I could go through 20 reasons why that's the case, but there's the shorthand is they are more prone to different addictions than are the next person, which means that having a daily recovery practice might be a second practice that a creative person really wants to put into place that is paying attention to their recovery needs on a daily basis.

And these, just to. Combine those two ideas for one split second in early recovery, what's going to happen for a creative person is that suddenly they may get very ambitious because they've not been able to get their work done previously, perhaps. And now they're in early recovery. And now they want to do that play with 17 characters.

They want to get to it because now they, they feel primed to do it or prepared to do it. And that energy is exactly counter energy to recovery energy. That first things first one day at a time, easy does it energy. So in early recovery, creatives have to be very careful of not choosing too ambitious projects to work on.

They have to be a little modest and moderate. I know that's out of left field. That wasn't what we were talking about. No, but it makes sense. It makes sense. And it's true. It's true. It's true that early recovery is a very important time in, in many creative lives to get their future creativity on a good footing.

.

And it really underscores this, embrace your purpose, embrace your own creativity and be gentle with yourself

sometimes. That's exactly right. And have a life. I don't believe in, as I, as you folks can tell from what I'm saying, I don't believe in the idea of putting all of your eggs in a creativity basket.

Those creatives who have done that, who've who who live for nothing but creating, still create, still commit suicide. , that wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to make 400 paintings in a year like Van Gogh. That's not enough. That's not the answer is to make another painting. The answer is to have a life.

And that's what folks need to think about. They need to craft and cobble a life together that works, not just be creative, but that the whole life works.

Yes. And if what Eric is saying and what we're talking about now is resonating with you and you are feeling some mental health challenges, I hope you will reach out to local resources to help you with those.

And if I can just put a plug in here for a website, if the sorts of mental health things we're talking about are of interest, I do recommend a website called madinamerica. com. It provides an alternate view to the common view of mental disorder paradigm stuff. It's a critical psychology and critical psychiatry website.

And if you want to have a different vision of what depression means or anxiety means or etc. I recommend madinamerica. com. Oh, we'll have

a link to that in our notes as well. Eric, thanks so much for sharing your insights, your experience, and some of these practical tips. Really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

It's been a lot of fun. I like being in your cafe. Yes, indeed.

And listeners, come back again. We'll continue these virtual coffees. I also like what Eric is saying. It's great to go around the world. These days we can connect with creatives all over for inspiration, for support, for collaboration. So we'll keep exploring, we'll keep creating, and remember, the world is waiting for your unique creative voice.

So for now, I'm Mark Stinson, and we'll keep unlocking your world of creativity. Bye for now.