Creativity Coaching in London and the UK

Creativity Coaching: Coaching for Artists and Creative People

Creative work is demanding and difficult in a whole host of ways. Perhaps you’re trying to create regularly and failing. Or setting out on a large project and feeling overwhelmed or confused. Perhaps your work never meets the high standards you set.

Internal issues may hold you back, like procrastination, fear, or preparatory research which never actually ends. Or external problems like earning a living or a family which doesn’t understand the importance of what your’re doing.

By the time you actually get down to your creative work – if you get there – you feel exhausted, demoralised, or even bored. Then it’s hard to continue and harder still to complete. Or even if your work is going well, you feel you lack a life. 

That’s where ‘creativity coaching’ can help.

Creativity coaching is coaching which focuses on the specific difficulties and problems which creative people face. It puts your creative work at centre stage and helps you get to the root of emotional or cognitive causes for creative problems. Coaching helps you fashion a balanced, happy life which feeds your creative work. It helps you create structured goals to stay productive. And it helps you keep real about issues like money or publicising your work, while staying in touch with your creative daimon.

While coaching won’t provide you with ready-made answers to such problems, it will give you space to work out your own answers, along with tools and exercises to help you find your way.

And it provides you with a support and a cheerleader along the way.

Some Problems Faced By Creative People

There are many unique problems faced by creative people. One primary one is isolation. You need solitude to work or to practise. But you also need people and a life to be happy and to feed your work. 

Other problems may be:

• Your can’t articulate your creative needs and values. When you do, people don’t understand.
• Your work isn’t valued by those about you.
• You can’t find the particular kind of nurturing, mentoring or support that you need.
• You feel scared, anxious or depressed, and unable to create.
• Your  work doesn’t match up to your inner ideal vision.
• You feel a failure.
• You feel a fraud.
• You work a ‘good’ day job, which takes all your time and energy and prevents you creating.

How Can Creativity Coaching Help?

A creativity coach is someone who is on your side, who understands the particular difficulties you face and can help you work through them. This may mean getting to grips with the novel you have started but can’t finish; it may mean working out what prevents you from applying for auditions.

Coaching can:

• Give you the kind of support and guidance you need.
• Help you strip away the excuses/fears to drill down to what really matters right now, whether that’s setting up a daily creativity practice or working on your self-esteem.
• Point out the other sides of the question which you can’t or don’t want to see!
• Help with the psychological/emotional problems which are often at the root of things like procrastination or writer’s block.
• Help you develop resilience to deal with setbacks, delays and criticism.
• Help you to refocus on what’s important when you are bogged down in the middle of a project
• Remind you to have your feet on the ground when you soar too high with ideas but don’t actually get any of them done.
• Help you formulate practical goals for your work.
• Help you create a support network or a network of peers.
• Helps you place your creative practice within a balanced life.
• Look at the practical side of publicising your work and also the emotional aspects.

It’s Not About ‘Conforming’

Although I work with you to address emotional or cognitive factors which may be holding you back and I offer help with dealing with issues like anxiety and depression, this isn’t because you have to fit into some box before you can create. It’s to help you create more, create better and find more happiness in the process.

As we can see from many indie films, you don’t have to be ‘perfect’ before you can create  – wounded people or people who believe they are no-hopers can still do magnificent things. We also see this in the lives of many artists – they may do badly at school, be inundated with debt, have dyslexia or depression, fail repeatedly at first, or have no success until they’re past middle-age, but they still created what they wanted to create.

However, they did learn to manage their internal and external worlds, and organise these to support their creative work.

Creativity coaching helps you to do that too. So that you can do more of what’s really important for you.

What it really boils down to is this:

• If you go green with envy at the sight of ‘successful’ creative people.
• If life is a blur of tube-work-home-eat-sleep with no time to create the growth you want in your creative projects.
• If you wonder “Where did the magic go“?
• If you can’t commit, choose, or actually do your creative work.
• If you think you’re too old, too young, or too whatever, to do what you really want  to do.
• If you feel adrift in life without the map, that everyone else seems to have received at the outset.

Now is the time to do something about it.