Creativity coaching means different things to different people. In the world of business it tends to mean the art of helping individuals become better problem-solvers and innovators.

Very often it means teaching a course or leading a workshop based on a text, typically Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way or my Fearless Creating or Coaching the Artist Within.

Sometimes it stands for a mentoring relationship between a coach and an artist aimed primarily at solving marketplace problems, like how to price your canvases or how to land gigs for your band.

It's also become a new rubric for classical teaching, so that a course that was called novel writing a decade ago might now be reframed by its instructor as a course in unlocking creative potential.

These are some of the senses and uses of the phrase.

They are all reasonable. But I have something different in mind when I use the phrase. By creativity coaching I mean the activity of one person helping another person with every aspect of that person's creative life, including the psychological, emotional, existential, and practical problems that arise as a client tries to create.

Virtually nothing is out-of-bounds as a creativity coach endeavors to help his client write, paint, invent, or compose, find and make meaning, maintain mental health, enjoy a measure of happiness, and lead a good life whose centerpiece activity is creating.

This is what I mean by creativity coaching. Probably it could also be called life coaching for creative people. However it's named, I think it is a new vocation for a new century.

The need for good ones is already critical and will only grow greater as millions of people try to honor their creative impulses and, as a result, are confronted by the problems that all creators face.

Recently I received the following letter:

    "Dear Dr. Maisel:

    Your books have meant a great deal to me in working through a lifetime of creative anorexia. The power of that self-withholding has been difficult to face and fear itself is the first and most massive desert that I feel I am still crossing. The temptation to escape into dreams of 'if only' are so warm and comforting and the distant mountains of mastery seem so remote and, when glimpsed, such cold and solitary comfort (though not without beauty) that I have been tempted more than once to go the way of the little match girl. But, as you point out, there is a force so compelling and so instinctual to create meaning in one's life, that with rather hobbled steps I'm still trying.

    With that preamble, I come to the reason for my letter. I wonder if you know of any groups of people or practitioners like yourself in Seattle, Washington whom I can contact and get some personal support from in this effort? I am a painter and writer and have taken classes at most of the art schools in the area. These have been good but isolated encounters and I have not yet found the bridge between a beginner's effort and a deeper creative traction.

    This letter may make it seem as though I am just beginning this journey. But my entire career as a producer of film and video projects and art exhibitions for others has been dancing around the edges of the creative life, only to dance away again into the next thing that pays the rent. My decision to write to you is a commitment to myself which has been a long time coming. I have danced away into helping some very talented people fulfill their creative visions, only to find that I have given away the very energy and determination I needed to do the hard work of personal mastery.

    I am 50 years old and not unaware that my mid-life transition is making the process all the more urgent. And I imagine I am also right in the middle of a pretty fat demographic in this regard. But none of that discourages me. I look forward to your reply and I thank you for any time you can find to respond to my request."

This artist is not looking for a psychotherapist, a marketing guru, a painting class, or a class in creativity. She is looking for a kind of support and direction that is not offered in art schools, counseling clinics, pastoral offices, or career centers.

She is one of countless people who feel an inner necessity to manifest potential and make meaning but who come up against inner and outer obstacles and become blocked and thwarted. She is looking for a creativity coach.

In my own case, I am trained as a psychotherapist, which informs what I do, and I have been a writer for thirty-five years, which also informs what I do. But creativity coaching is not psychotherapy and it is not the teaching of writing, painting, inventing, composing, or acting.

Creativity coaching is unlike any other kind of coaching or advising, primarily because of what it encompasses.

It encompasses the whole of a client's life and the totality of human nature in a way that not even pastoral counseling or psychotherapy does. A cleric may invite you to do soul work.

A psychotherapist may invite you to do personality work. But a creativity coach invites you to think hard, feel deeply, dream big, and be great. A creativity coach invites you to manifest your potential.

A creativity coach asks you to step up to the plate and live a vital, authentic life.

Because that is a lot to ask, and because almost all people are burdened in ways that make it hard for them to create, I have to be modest about what I expect.

At the same time, because clients know that uncreativity is the equivalent of spiritual death, they will only respond if a lot is asked of them. So I have to hold out a large vision.

This is the path a creativity coach walks, setting out the baby steps that a client is able to take while at the same time honoring the client's need to do work that is deep and grand.

The client may hunger to be a new Shakespeare or Mozart but may only get a few indifferent lines penned this month. That is not enough but it is also not nothing. A creativity coach builds on that modest but real success to urge clients on further.

Creativity coaches should know creativity firsthand but they need training as well as personal experience as a painter, dancer, poet, inventor, botanist, or weaver if they are to creativity coach effectively. This is true for many important reasons, including the following eight:

   1.    Creators live the creative process but often do not understand it and frequently claim not to want to understand it.

   2.    Creators are often burdened by the knowledge that they have not sufficiently manifested their own potential, do not know how to help themselves, and are in no position to help others.

   3.   Unless they are practiced at interpersonal relating and fairly mentally healthy, creators will find their coaching subverted by their shadowy feelings of envy, unhealthy narcissism, despair, rage at the system, and so on.

   4.    Creators may know their discipline but not know any other discipline, so while they may have something to say to poets they may have nothing to say to physicists, or vice versa.

   5.    Creators may resort to the jargon of theory and offer advice about accessing the unconscious, identifying archetypes, opening to God, and so on, advice which as a rule does not help another person create.

   6.    Creators may harbor the feeling that there is really nothing to say, that creativity is all in the doing, and may actually resent the idea of communicating with another person.

   7.    Creators may be less than excellent at what they do and may pass along mediocre ideas about what it takes to create and what it means to create.

   8.    Creators may know how to create but not know how to help another person, just as they may know how to ride a bicycle but not know how to help their child deal with the fears, bumps, and bruises of beginning to ride.

Similarly, psychotherapists are not creativity coaches merely by virtue of the fact that they have psychological training and training as helpers. Here is a short list of why this is so:

   1.   There is no training that will help a person who is not psychologically-minded become psychologically-minded. Many psychotherapists do not know human nature very well and do not care to know about it.

   2.   The training a psychotherapist receives is aimed at helping her diagnose and treat illness or, if she dislikes the medical model, treat psychological and emotional problems. But nothing in her training prepares her to help a client manifest potential.

   3.   Psychotherapists are not trained to think about meaning. (The exception is the existential psychotherapist, but there are few of them and what they mean by meaning is not usually persuasive.) Creative clients are always thinking about meaning and are often in the throes of a mild, moderate, or severe meaning crisis, so they need a kind of help that psychotherapists are not equipped to offer.

   4.   A psychotherapist may have no particular understanding of the realities of the creative process or the creative personality. Those who have some idea may still have too limited an understanding and may fall back on thoughtless labeling and rote treatment planning.

   5.   A psychotherapist may have no conception of the goals and objectives of the creative client sitting across from her. She may find it sensible to focus on a presenting depression but her client may need help unblocking and creating, at which time the depression would lift of its own accord.

   6.   The creative life may make no sense to the psychotherapist, as she may hold conventional ideas about where meaning resides and may have no heartfelt grasp of why a client would cling fiercely to the need to write poetry or have his ideas about string theory validated and vindicated.

   7.   Although it is her job, a psychotherapist may not know how to help another person.

   8.   A psychotherapist may inadvertently or maliciously pathologize her creative clients, labeling natural artistic anxiety an anxiety disorder or the necessary stubborn pride, arrogance, and self-direction of the creator a narcissistic personality disorder.

A veteran poet may not be equipped to help another poet and a veteran therapist may be similarly unequipped.

What the veteran poet knows may be inchoate and unavailable and what the veteran therapist knows may be misguided and incorrect. Nor is there some other professional who necessarily comes equipped with what is needed — no cleric, social worker, dance therapist, editor, acting teacher, or, for that matter, self-proclaimed creativity coach.

Creativity coaches are only creativity coaches if they have the right stuff.

What is this right stuff? What ought a creativity coach know and understand? She ought to know and understand the following six things:

    * the creative process
    * the creative personality
    * existential reality
    * practical reality
    * human nature
    * how to help

That's all, really. She only needs to know just about everything. Of course, we will all fall short of this ideal. But there really is an ideal and it really is necessary that we approach these lofty heights.

If you would like to train as a creativity coach, see my Trainings and Workshops. If you would like to learn more about creativity coaching, your two best resources are Coaching the Artist Within, the first book on creativity coaching and Becoming a Creativity Coach, available only at my site.

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Eric Maisel, Ph.D. holds Master's degrees in Creative Writing and Counseling, and a Doctorate in Counseling Psychology. He is a California licensed marriage and family therapist, a creativity coach and trainer of creativity coaches, and teaches through lectures, workshops, and teleseminars.

Dr. Maisel is widely regarded as America's foremost creativity coach and has taught thousands of creative and performing artists how to incorporate Ten Zen Second mindfulness techniques into their creativity practice. See his site EricMaisel.com for ebooks and more information on his work.

He is the author of more than thirty books - some titles at right:

Also see more articles by Eric Maisel.

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