What is creativity coaching?

by dr. Eric Maisel
 
As I practice it and envision it, it is one person offering soup-to-nuts help to another person who is trying to live a successful creative life. The creative client may have career concerns, creative blocks, psychological issues, relationship issues, or existential and spiritual crises, and may face a gamut of challenges that come from wanting and needing to create. A creativity coach expects all of this and is ready for all of this.

An effective creativity coach is aware of the big picture: human nature, personality structure, the psychological makeup of creative individuals, the problems inherent in the work creative individuals attempt, the shape of the different intellectual and art marketplaces, and so on. When a client comes in, the coach joins with the new client, as one human being to another and one creative person to another, listens to what the client is saying, and makes observations and suggestions.

Creative clients may doubt that they have talent, may dislike the creative work they've attempted so far, may be confused about what creative projects they ought to be attempting, may be thoroughly down on the world for its lack of interest in their efforts, and so on. All of this the creativity coach expects and is prepared to address.

Creativity coaching is NOT psychotherapy. There may be times when an acting coach, for instance, is aware that he or she is dealing with a student's psychological issues and that those issues are standing in the way of the student finding the willingness to audition, think sensibly about choices, go deep, and so on. The wise acting coach has ways of dealing with this, but he or she is not and should not be acting as a psychotherapist. The same for creativity coaches. They need to have psychological insight and acumen and recognize that psychology is on the table whenever one human being attempts to help another. But the coaching they offer does not represent itself as psychotherapy, any more than the mentoring or coaching that a good writing teacher or art teacher provides represents itself as psychotherapy.