Mastering Creative Anxiety

24 Lessons for Writers, Painters, Musicians, and Actors from America's Foremost Creativity Coach

Eric Maisel

• Publisher: New World Library
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781577319337
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Creativity

In his decades as a psychotherapist and creativity coach, Eric Maisel has found a common thread behind what often gets labeled "writer's block, " "procrastination, " or "stage fright." It's the particular anxiety that, paradoxically, keeps creators from doing, completing, or sharing the work they are driven toward. This "creative anxiety" can take the form of avoiding the work, declaring it not good enough, or failing to market it — and it can cripple creators for decades, even lifetimes. But Maisel has learned what sets successful creators apart. He shares these strategies here, including artist-specific stress management; how to work despite bruised egos, day jobs, and other inevitable frustrations; and what not to do to deal with anxiety. Implementing these 24 lessons replaces the pain of not creating with the profound rewards of free artistic self-expression.

CHAPTER 1

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THE ANXIETY OF CREATING AND NOT CREATING

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Anxiety is part of the human condition. And it is a much larger part than most people realize. A great deal of what we do in life we do to reduce our experience of anxiety or to avoid anxiety altogether. Our very human defensiveness is one of the primary ways that we avoid experiencing anxiety. If something is about to make us anxious we deny that it is happening, make ourselves sick so that we can concentrate on our sickness, get angry at our mate so as to have something else to focus on, and so on. We are very tricky creatures in this regard.

We are also very wonderful creatures who have it in us to create. Creativity is the word we use for our desire to make use of our inner resources, employ our imagination, knit together our thoughts and feelings into beautiful things such as songs, quilts, or novels, and feel like the hero of our own story. It is the way that we make manifest our potential, make use of our intelligence, and embrace what we love. When we create, we feel whole, useful, and devoted. Unfortunately, we often also feel anxious as we create or contemplate creating. There are many reasons for this — the subject of our twenty-four lessons. We get anxious because we fear failing, because we fear disappointing ourselves, because the work can be extremely hard, because the marketplace may criticize us and reject us. We want to create, but we also don’t want to create so as to spare ourselves all this anxiety. That is the simple, profound dilemma that millions of people find themselves in.

The solution sounds very simple but is much harder to put into practice. To create and to deal with all the anxiety that comes with creating, you must acknowledge and accept that anxiety is part of the process, demand of yourself that you will learn — and really practice! — anxiety-management skills so that you can master the anxiety that arises, and get on with your creating and your anxiety management. It is too tragic not to create if creating is what you long to do, and there is no reason for you not to create if “all” that is standing in the way is your quite human, very ordinary experience of anxiety. It is time to become an anxiety expert and get on with your creating!

HEADLINE

Since both creating and not creating produce anxiety in anyone who wants to create, you might as well embrace the fact that anxiety will accompany you on your journey as a creative person — whether or not you are getting on with your work. Just embracing that reality will release a lot of the ambient anxiety that you feel. Since anxiety accompanies both states — creating and not creating — why not choose creating?

TO DO

Pick your next creative project or return to your current one with a new willingness to accept the reality of anxiety. To help reduce your experience of anxiety, remember to breathe deeply, speak positively to yourself, and affirm that your creative life matters to you. If some anxiety remains, create anyway!

AND

Use the anxiety mastery menu at the end of this lesson. This work will richly reward you. Making a real effort to deal with your anxiety will allow you to get on with your creating and to create deeply and regularly.

VOW

I will create, even if doing so provokes anxiety; and when it does, I will manage it through the use of the anxiety-management skills and techniques I am learning and practicing.

TEACHING TALE

Each lesson in this book comes with a teaching tale that illustrates the lesson’s point. The following teaching tale features Ari, a fictional creativity coach who lives and works in an unnamed desert location. Modeled on Sufi teaching tales, these tales employ naturalistic and fantastic elements and present a moral at the end. Enjoy!

THE GHOST WITH CONSCIOUSNESS AND POTENTIAL

One day a ghost paid Ari a visit. The ghost had long blond hair and wore a banana-colored satin nightgown. Even though she had the power to interrupt and to come and go as she pleased, she arrived between creativity coaching sessions as a gesture of respect and goodwill.

“I never got to use my talents!” the ghost wailed. She floated about the room, agitated and unable to alight. “Now I’m dead and buried!”

“You can’t create where you find yourself these days?” Ari asked the miserable ghost.

“No! I just wander the universe, pointlessly and aimlessly!”

“But you sound like you still have a brain?”

That seemed to surprise the ghost. She shot out of the air and sat down suddenly.

“That’s true,” she replied.

“And you can talk to people?”

“Yes.”

“Then why not be a muse?”

“A muse,” she murmured. For an instant she looked happy. But then a new thought creased her brow. “Since I never manifested my own potential, how can I help others?”

“Just by telling the truth. Are ghosts more honest than the next person?”

“Not particularly.”

“Too bad. But that was an honest thing for you to say! So it appears that you can tell the truth. So, if I were you, I would think about why I hadn’t been able to create while I was alive, I would learn the painful truth about that, and then I would visit people who are despairing and help them.”

The ghost fell silent.

“I’m drawing a blank,” she finally said, “about why I avoided creating my whole life long. Not that it was such a long life!” she interjected suddenly. “I died at thirty-nine.”

Ari nodded. “But if it had been sixty-nine or eighty-nine —”

“No, you’re right. I was not on the path to creating. I could have lived another fifty years, and I wouldn’t have accomplished anything.”

She flew off the chair and circled the room ten or fifteen times. Ari, watching her, began to get dizzy.

“Come down here!” he cried. “Settle down for a moment!”

The ghost dove to her seat and sat there hunched and moody.

“For a lifetime you couldn’t create,” Ari said. “Why should you be able to figure out the reasons for that in a split second? Don’t you think it’s going to take a little time?”

This cheered her. “Well, all right. But how will I learn?”

“Picture the thing you always wanted. What was it?”

She had the answer on the tip of her tongue. “To spin stories like Scheherazade,” the ghost said with real passion. “To hold audiences captive. I knew Scheherazade. She had something I didn’t have. Some spunk. Some fire. A gleam in her eye.”

“No!” Ari disagreed. “She manifested something that you didn’t. There’s a difference. Don’t you have a fire burning in you? Of course you do!”

“She was also beautiful,” the ghost continued.

“That’s no way to think!” Ari leaned forward. “You are brooding about the accomplishments of others. You’re thinking about Scheherazade, not about you. You’re making yourself into a failure by thinking about her successes. Your despair flows from your envy.”

“Thank you!” the ghost said bitterly.

“You do have potential,” Ari replied calmly. “You have all the genetic material you need. Just not the mental health.”

“Mental health!” the ghost exclaimed. “I’ve been insane for hundreds of years!”

The ghost flew up out of her seat and began circling the room at breakneck speed. She seemed out of control and bent on crashing into walls and objects. But, strange to say, she had no accidents.

“You came here because you wanted to change,” Ari said softly.

“Change! How can a ghost change?”

“You keep running from the obvious. You can still think. But you won’t. You have retained consciousness, but you are unwilling to grow in awareness.”

Tears trickled down the ghost’s cheeks.

“Even a ghost can heal,” Ari said, “if she can love again.”

“Love?” the ghost whispered. “Have we been talking about love?” She stopped in midair. “You mean —?”

“Love yourself. If you can accomplish that, then you will begin to love others. The desire to help will well up out of that love. One day, without noticing what a tremendous trip you have taken, you will have become a muse.”

A new fluttering filled the room. Then silence descended. The ghost had vanished, her disappearance accompanied by the tinkling of bells. For a moment Ari wondered if she had really visited. He sat quietly, feeling for shifts in the universe. In a while it came to him that a little more love was present in the universe, which he took to be proof of the ghost’s visit and of its successful outcome.

MORAL: You can make yourself anxious in all sorts of ways. The answer is to love yourself and, out of that love and devotion, demand that you do whatever work is necessary to reduce your experience of anxiety.

Your Anxiety Mastery Menu

TWENTY-TWO TECHNIQUES FOR MASTERING ANEXIETY

Let me end this lesson with the reminder with which I will end each of our lessons: you must learn and practice anxiety-management techniques if you are to master your anxiety!

Anxiety mastery requires that you actually do the work of managing and reducing your anxiety. It is not enough to have a refined sense of why and when you become anxious: you must then do something.

Most people who know they are anxious do not make enough effort to change their situation, opting instead to “white-knuckle” life, medicate themselves with antianxiety medication (which can be useful in some circumstances), or make do with alternative medicine approaches (likes teas or homeopathic remedies).

Core work requires more than this: it requires a diligent, systematic effort to find techniques that work for you, especially cognitive ones that retrain your neurons to fire differently, and to then actually employ those techniques.

Experiment with the following twenty-two anxiety-reduction strategies, learn which ones work for you, and begin to use those that work best. Please be sure to actually use the ones that work best for you! Knowing about them is not enough — you must practice them and use them. In subsequent lessons we’ll look at each of these techniques in turn and examine them more closely.

1. Existential decisiveness. Indecisiveness about what matters, about whether you personally matter, about whether meaning resides over here or whether it resides over there, and about what constitutes the right life for you breeds anxiety. When you tackle these issues directly and become existentially decisive, you become less anxious. The first step in becoming existentially decisive is returning the control of meaning to you by asserting — and really believing — that you are in charge of the meaning in your life.

2. Attitude choice. You can choose to be made anxious by every new opinion you hear, or you can choose to keep your own counsel. You can choose to be overvigilant of all the changes in your environment and overconcerned about small problems, or you can shrug away such changes and problems. You can choose to involve yourself in every controversy, or you can choose to pick your battles and maintain a serene distance from most of life’s commotion. You can choose to approach life anxiously, or you can choose to approach it calmly. It is a matter of flipping an internal switch — one that you control.

3. Personality upgrading. The prospect of getting some bad news makes you anxious. All wound up, you lash out at your mate, eat a ton of potato chips, shut down emotionally, or drive dangerously fast. This is your personality at work. You know that most of the people around you could use a bit of a personality upgrade — well, probably the same is true for you. The more aware and the less reactive you become, the less anxious you will feel. A key anxiety-management strategy is identifying the changes you would like to make to your personality, and then making them.

4. Improved appraising. Incorrectly appraising situations as more important, more dangerous, or more negative than they really are raises your anxiety level. If you consider the weight of paper you use when printing out your manuscripts important, you are making yourself anxious. If you hold it as dangerous to send out your f...