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What is creativity coaching?

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 character choices, 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 is true 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.

Many people have the desire to help others manifest their creativity and successfully negotiate the challenges that come with the artist's life. You may be one of those people. Maybe you're a psychologist, social worker, or family therapist. Maybe you're a career counselor, consultant, or coach already. Maybe you're an artist in one of the disciplines or someone who always meant to be an artist. Whatever your background, you probably never received any specific training in creativity coaching. Now that training is available to you and a profession exists to support you should you decide to travel down that path.

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 canvases or how to land gigs. It's also become a new rubric for 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 creativity coaches 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.

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 living a non-creative life 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 his client on further.

Creativity coaches should know creativity firsthand but they also need training in creativity coaching. A veteran poet may not be equipped to help another struggling poet and a veteran therapist may be similarly unequipped to help that struggling poet. Nor is there some other professional who comes equipped with what is needed — no cleric, social worker, dance therapist, editor, acting teacher, or, for that matter, self-proclaimed creativity coach. The only person who stands ready to really help is someone with the “right stuff.” What is this right stuff? It is an understanding of 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 everything! Of course, we will each fall far short of this ideal. But there really is an ideal and it is good to keep these lofty heights in mind as we practice this new profession of ours, creativity coaching.

If you would like to train with me to become a creativity coach, please visit my training page.

If you would like to learn a lot more about creativity coaching, please purchase my ebook Becoming a Creativity Coach.

Make sure to visit the Creativity Coaching Association’s website to learn more about creativity coaching and the certification process.

And keep posted on the latest creativity coaching news at my blog and on my podcast.