books

Below are more than 50 of Dr. Maisel’s published books. 

Redesign Your Mind: The Breakthrough Program for Real Cognitive Change 

(Coming September 1, 2021, from Mango)

How to Change What You Think in Sixty Days. Experience a complete cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) program in just sixty days. With simple visualization exercises, Eric Maisel, PhD. guides you through CBT techniques that change not only what you think but how you think. Understand why you think what you think. Packed with visualization exercises, this accessible guide makes redesigning what you think easy and simple.

Transformational Journaling for Coaches, Therapists and Clients: A Complete Guide to the Benefits of Personal Writing

(Coming Spring, 2021 from Routledge)

In Transformational Journaling for Coaches, Therapists, and Clients: A Complete Guide to the Benefits of Personal Writing, more than fifty coaches, therapists, and journaling experts from around the world share their best practices and explain in detail how they use journaling to improve their work with clients. This edited collection brings together the leading voices of the journaling world into one ground-breaking volume, providing practical techniques and tools to use with clients. Applicable and accessible, over fifty journaling luminaries share their experiences and insights across 7 sections, including the logic of journaling, techniques and applications, using journaling with clients, journaling in groups, journaling for mental health and wellness, growth and healing, spirituality, creativity, and more.

The Power of Daily Practice: How Creative and Performing Artists (and Everyone Else) Can Finally Meet Their Goals

(September 8, 2020, New World Library)

Eric Maisel knows from experience and observation that the single most crucial element of success for any endeavor is a regular, daily practice. Dr. Maisel, a preeminent creativity coach, therapist, and acclaimed author, shows how and why to implement a daily practice and addresses common challenges. His experience working with bestselling writers, entrepreneurs, musicians, actors, visual artists, recovering addicts, and rehabilitation patients shows as he outlines various ways to approach a daily practice and goes on to help you build a version of this important discipline that suits your life and goals. Real-world stories and practical examples will help you make measurable progress and build satisfaction in your most cherished pursuits.

Lighting the Way: How Kirism Answers Life’s Toughest Questions

(June 10, 2020, Crossways Press)

Finally, there is a contemporary philosophy of life that matches our knowledge of the universe and our understanding of human nature. Lighting the Way is the powerful introduction to the revolutionary philosophy of kirism. Created and developed by Eric Maisel, kirism answers life’s biggest questions, about life purpose, meaning, the entanglements of personality, the nature of ethical action, and more: about who we are, where we find ourselves, and how we might choose to live. Kirism is a twenty-first-century philosophy of life with the power to uplift millions.

The Creativity Workbook for Coaches and Creatives: 50+ Inspiring Exercises from Creativity Coaches Worldwide

(May 11, 2020, Routledge)

In this practical workbook, creativity coaches from around the world share their best exercises to help the reader meet the demands of the creative process, the creative personality, and the creative life.
This book is packed with an extensive list of exercises that have been vetted by coaches working on the frontlines of creativity, and tried, tested, and proven effective with coaching clients. The hands-on activities cover a wide range of common challenges, including creative blocks and resistance, waning and lost motivation, making time for creating, the pain of disappointment, and more. Ideal for coaches and therapists, as well as creatives in every discipline, this book is a valuable aid for achieving creative realization.

Unleashing the Artist Within: Breaking through Blocks and Restoring Creative Purpose 

February 12, 2020 (Dover)

A family therapist and founder of the creativity coaching profession, Eric Maisel helps clients unlock their creative power. Employing anecdotes and real-life case studies, he explains how he helps clients work through the realities of the process, push past everyday resistance, restore lost meaning, recover from dashed hopes, manage the daily grind, and so much more. Painters, writers, actors, dancers, and musicians will all benefit from Dr. Maisel’s decades of experience.

Inside Creativity Coaching: 40 Inspiring Case Studies from Around the World 

October 13, 2019 (Routledge)

In Inside Creative Coaching, forty creativity coaches from around the world describe their work with creative clients in this first-ever case study examination of the art and practice of creativity coaching.

Curated by one of America’s foremost creativity coaches, these rich narratives examine how creativity coaches work with writers, painters, musicians, craftspeople, and other creatives on issues such as motivation, procrastination, blockage, and performance and career anxiety. Packed with concrete tools and techniques, the book draws on inspirational success stories from across the globe to help coaches better understand and serve their creative clients. It will be a valuable resource to creativity coaches, coaches interested in developing a specialty, and creatives and performing artists looking to overcome their challenges.

Covering a diverse range of disciplines, Inside Creativity Coaching is a must-have book for aspiring and experienced creativity coaches and anyone interested in helping creatives.

A Writer’s Paris: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul

August 14, 2019 (Dover Reprint Edition)

Enrich your life and write with more intensity than ever on a spirit-renewing adventure in the City of Light. Experience Paris not as a tourist but as a creator, where you dedicate yourself to the bohemian life in picturesque parks, cafés, and bookstores. In this guided tour of a beloved destination that has sparked the imagination of countless writers and artists, leading creativity coach Eric Maisel offers insights on how to use the city to spur commitment to your craft.

Beyond the metaphor of Paris as a place of creativity, Maisel provides practical tools for you to use upon committing to this journey: tips for writing at the Place des Vosges while soaking in the surrounding architecture and vibrant energy; advice on the best time to visit the Musée d’Orsay for maximum inspiration; and ideas for engaging all the senses during strolls through churches and subways of this dazzling location. In brief essays that are whimsically illustrated, Maisel helps you put your dreams into action, encouraging you to move beyond the idea of living and writing in Paris to the reality of doing it, for three weeks or three years or anytime in between.

Helping Parents of Diagnosed, Distressed, and Different Children: A Guide for Professionals

May 11, 2019 (Routledge)

In Helping Parents of Diagnosed, Distressed, and Different Children, Eric Maisel provides clinicians with the tools they need to address the issues facing the parents of diagnosed children. In these pages, mental health professionals will find tips for using the right language to guide families through situations such as sibling bullying and parental divorce, as well as guidelines for thinking critically about children’s mental health. Filled with hands-on resources including checklists and questionnaires, this valuable guide offers clinicians a set of strategies to help parents deal effectively with their child’s distress, regardless of the source.

Ten Zen Seconds: Twelve Incantations for Purpose, Power and Calm

October 17, 2018 (Dover Reprint Edition)

In the midst of life’s ongoing pressures, a powerful, ten-second technique can change fear or worry into calm, strength, and centeredness. The basis of Ten Zen Seconds lies in using a single deep breath as a container for a specific thought. Blending Eastern principles of breath awareness and mindfulness with Western principles of positive psychology, this guide presents meditative incantations that offer powerful antidotes to stress, procrastination, and anxiety.

The technique is simple to grasp, simple to use, simple to practice, and simple to master. It can be used anywhere, anytime, by anyone, and it provides profound benefits. You’ll find yourself able to do things that previously felt too painful or too difficult to attempt and discover how to quiet and center yourself before an important meeting or conversation. Ultimately, you’ll change your basic attitudes about life, becoming peaceful and upbeat instead of anxious or pessimistic.

Helping Survivors of Authoritarian Parents, Siblings, and Partners: A Guide for Professionals

September 28, 2018 (Routledge)

Helping Survivors of Authoritarian Parents, Siblings, and Partners considers the notion of the authoritarian personality in a family context and examines the extent to which authoritarians traumatize the people closest to them. Building on primary research, Dr. Maisel presents first-person accounts of life with authoritarian family members and provides clinicians and other professionals with tactics and strategies for helping clients who struggle with the impact of these experiences. This unique look at authoritarians at home serves to redefine the authoritarian personality, expand our understanding of family trauma, and give voice to the silent epidemic of authoritarian wounding.

The Magic of Sleep Thinking: How to Solve Problems, Reduce Stress, and Increase Creativity While You Sleep

April 18, 2018 (Dover reprint edition)

Imagine solving problems and increasing creativity while you sleep! Grounded in current brain research, this book introduces a simple but revolutionary program that shows how to do just that by learning to tune into your brain’s deepest intuitions. Case studies of ordinary people demonstrate how to use sleep thinking to tackle anxiety, weight gain, anger management issues, poor school grades, and more through a bit of self-inquiry, new bedtime and morning routines, and a few other lifestyle changes and additions.

Dr. Eric Maisel presents clear, useful information relevant to anyone working through any sort of problem: personal, creative, or career-related. Readers learn how to use their own brainpower to extract important information from sleep thinking, yielding answers that lead to actions and actions that lead to change.

60 Innovative Cognitive Strategies for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative: New Investigations into the Home of the Mind

March 25, 2018 (Routledge)

In this book, Dr. Maisel employs the metaphor of “the room that is your mind” to provide 60 cognitive strategies that enable smart, sensitive, creative clients to engage in dynamic self-regulation for greater awareness, insight, and enhanced mental capabilities. Issues that are examined include repetitive and obsessional thinking, self-criticism and a lack of self-confidence, anxiety and depression, reliving traumatic memories, and overdramatizing and catastrophizing. This is the perfect book for cognitive-behavioral therapists to suggest to clients and will be of great interest to clients whose needs for imaginative and metaphorically rich strategies often go unmet.

Become a Creativity Coach Now!

February 12, 2018 (Crossways Press)

Become a Creativity Coach Now! introduces you to the art and practice of creativity coaching. It is the text used in Eric Maisel’s Introduction to Creativity Coaching training and will give you a solid sense of what creativity coaches do. Many coach-in-training responses are included, to give you a sense of what coaches who are starting out think about and encounter as they begin to get their feet wet in the field of coaching. This text is not a substitute for trainings or for practical experience but it does provide a wide-ranging introduction to creativity coaching.

Your Great Coaching Career

January 17, 2018 (Crossways Press)

Learn from master coach Eric Maisel exactly how to build and maintain your coaching career. Whether you’re just thinking about coaching as a profession, in training as a coach, or already working as a coach, get clear on what a successful coaching practice looks like and how you can have it!

You’ll learn:

+ How to attract and secure clients

+ How to make choices with a big impact

+ How to think both locally and globally

+ How to find partners who can really help you

+ How to run coaching classes, workshops and retreats

And much more!

Get the clearest, most comprehensive, and most helpful advice available from a successful master coach whose worldwide reputation is second-to-none. If you are thinking about becoming a coach, training to be a coach, or hoping to build your practice as a coach, this book is a must! 

Humane Helping: Focusing Less on Disorders and More on Life’s Challenges

October 25, 2017 (Routledge)

Humane Helping is a comprehensive, practical guide that helps clinicians shift their practice from the mental disorder-and-chemical fix and expert-talk models to a more humane, helpful model that increases their ability to help clients meet life’s challenges and reduce emotional distress. Chapters clearly explain the shortfalls of the current models and the advantages of Eric Maisel’s model and include case studies, reflection questions, and actionable steps. Written for helping professionals in mental health as well as practitioners from fields such as coaching and nursing, Humane Helping challenges current practices and provides helpers with the tools they need to more compassionately, effectively, and honestly serve their clients.

Overcoming Your Difficult Family: 8 Skills for Thriving in Any Family Situation

June 9, 2017 (New World Library)

When you encounter difficult people in your daily life, the easiest solution is to cut and run. But when the difficult people in question are your parents, siblings, children, or all of the above, you can’t always end the relationships. What happens when you’re stuck with people who don’t respect boundaries or listen to reason? Author Eric Maisel, a licensed family therapist and life coach, tackles this awkward question in his new book Overcoming Your Difficult Family, providing answers gleaned from his own therapy practice. The first half of the book lists eight strategies for dealing with difficult relatives, whereas the second half acts as a kind of “field guide” to common types of dysfunctional families — authoritarian families, factionalized families, drug-addicted families, and more. By following Maisel’s battle-tested advice, you’ll learn to maintain inner peace in the midst of family chaos, and in the process, make everyone’s life a little better.

The Pen

April 23, 2017 (Crossways Press)

World War II has just ended. Revenge is in the air. All across France accusations are flying. Paris has decided to appoint one person in each town to investigate allegations and make life-and-death judgments. In eleven-year-old Lily Page’s small town of Sainte-Therese-Sur-Seine the hunt has begun for Nazi collaborators. Their fate rests in the hands of one man, Pascal Monette, the town lawyer, Lily’s neighbor, and the father of her best friend Albert.  

Nicknamed the Pen because of the power granted him by the central government, Pascal Monette has been empowered to sign death warrants for those he deems guilty of collaboration. Who is the first in his sights? It’s Lily’s older sister Beatrice, who stepped out with a German soldier during the war. But did Beatrice do something much worse than that? And if she did, can any power on earth save her? Lily will try … but can anyone stop the Pen from signing?

In a France hungry for revenge, the fate of Lily Page’s beautiful sister Beatrice rests squarely on Lily’s shoulders.

Hearing Critical Voices: An Eric Maisel Solutions Introduction to 60 Mental Health Innovators, Thought Leaders and Survivors

October 30, 2016 (Eric Maisel Solutions Press)

Psychiatry claims that mental disorders are like physical disorders and should be treated with chemicals called medication. A wave of opposition to this view argues that human behaviors and problems with living must not be labeled “mental disorders” in the absence of scientific or logical reasons to do so. In this book 60 practitioners and psychiatric survivors from around the world take a critical look at the pseudo-science of psychiatry.

Hearing Critical Voices includes interviews with Robert Whitaker, Joanna Moncrieff, Peter Breggin, Lois Holzman, James Gottstein, Jacqui Dillon, Sami Timimi, Bonnie Burstow, Gary Greenberg, Lucy Johnstone, Peter Kinderman, Eleanor Longden, and many more. Major sections include Deconstructing the Current Paradigm; Alternate Visions of Helping; Contemporary Alternative Practices; Survivor Peer Support, Recovery and Activism; and Children, Young Adults, and Families. This is the first book of interviews with 60 world-renowned alternative mental health experts.

The Life Purpose Diet: Your Path to Permanent, Meaningful Weight Loss

October 26, 2016 (Motivational Press)

“Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Atkins, you name it. Powders, pills, cleanses, all of it. But not until Life Purpose Diet did I connect my overeating and inability to stick to any eating or exercise plan with my finding meaning in my life. This is an easy read, and the clarity it provides you is uncomfortable at times, but so worth the look in the mirror. I no longer look at myself as someone who needs to be repaired. I wake up with a sense of what to do that truly gives my life meaning. I don’t beat myself up anymore. I lovingly care for this body and this life. Thank you.”—B. Davis

Aster Lynn

May 15, 2016 (New Street Communications)

“Aster is vivid, strong, and a feminist’s delight! That I finished it in one sitting is a testament to Maisel’s five-star writing skills. As a feminist and grassroots activist who has published in the scholarly and creative genres, I have a deep respect for the way Maisel moves fluidly, intelligently, and enchantingly through these territories. An enduring gift!”
— Si Transken, Faculty, University of Northern British Columbia

Murder in Berlin

January 8, 2016 (New Street Communications)

“MURDER IN BERLIN is moody, compelling and completely wonderful! Thomas Hill is a little Joe Pike and a little Arkady Renko but wholly original. You won’t soon forget Thomas Hill and the web of secrets that brings him to Berlin.”
– Cynthia Sterling, international bestselling author

With MURDER IN BERLIN, noted psychotherapist Eric Maisel delivers an impressive page-turner exercise in suspense and intrigue. In MURDER IN BERLIN Dr. Maisel demonstrates intense, masterful prowess in rendering both the positive and negative machinations of the human mind and spirit.

Why would a Jew choose Berlin? And why was this Jew murdered there?

Thomas Hill is sent to investigate the murder of Michael Silverstein, a prosperous Jewish entrepreneur who against the odds has made a life for himself in modern-day Berlin.

Hill must make sense of a cast of characters that includes Turkish gangs, Arab artists, neo-Nazis, Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and the Christian family into which Silverstein married—characters that make modern-day Berlin one of the most interesting cities on earth … all the while dealing with his own shadowy past.

The Future of Mental Health: Deconstructing the Mental Disorder Paradigm

December 9, 2015 (Transaction Publishers/Routledge)

The Future of Mental Health drills to the heart of the current mental health crisis, where hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide receive unwarranted “mental disorder diagnoses.” It paints a picture of how mental health providers can improve their practices to better serve individuals in distress and outlines necessary steps for a mental health revolution. Eric Maisel’s goal is to inject more human interaction into the therapeutic process.

Maisel powerfully deconstructs the “mental disorder” paradigm that is the foundation of current mental health practices. The author presents a revolutionary alternative, a “human experience” paradigm. He sheds a bright light on the differences between so-called “psychiatric medication” and mere chemicals with powerful effects, explains why the DSM-5 is silent on causes, silent on treatment, and wedded to illegitimate “symptom pictures.” Maisel describes powerful helping alternatives like communities of care, and explains why one day “human experience specialists” may replace current mental health professionals.

An important book for both service providers and service users, The Future of Mental Health brilliantly unmasks current mental health practices and goes an important step further: it describes what we are obliged to do in order to secure better mental health services—and better mental health—for everyone.

Life Purpose Boot Camp: The 8-Week Breakthrough Plan for Creating a Meaningful Life

September 15, 2014 (New World Library)

A no-excuses, cut-to-the-chase program for defining, training for, and achieving your goals

As life gets busier and more complicated we crave something larger and more meaningful than just ticking another item off our to-do list. In the past, we’ve looked to religion or outside guidance for that sense of purpose, but today fewer people are fulfilled by traditional approaches to meaning. Bestselling author, psychotherapist, and creativity coach Eric Maisel offers an alternative: an eight-week intensive that breaks through barriers and offers insights for living each day with purpose. Once you understand how meaning operates, how meaning and life purpose are related, and what concrete steps you can take toward fulfilling your purpose, you will never run out of meaning again. This program will develop self-awareness and self-confidence and give you what you need to fully live the best possible life.

Settled

March 31, 2014

What if Israelis moved en masse to a safer location where their children could grow up in peace and prosperity. And what if Jews from around the world began to join them? Could a single man create this historic exodus? How would the world react? And what forces might be unleashed as the idea of a second Israel began to take hold? Follow David Cohen from the moment he survives a suicide bombing in Jerusalem to that fateful day when he steps foot onto the island that will become New Israel. Live the epic adventure that may foreshadow world headlines! Settled is more than a novel about Israel and the Jews. It sets its sights higher to examine how a lone individual can make a difference. 

In our times of meaning crises and life purpose difficulties, with untold millions going through the motions and wondering why there isn’t more to life, Settled provides a blueprint for individual engagement. It announces to readers, maybe creating a second Israel isn’t among your important life purposes but what is? On the one hand Settled is an odyssey of adventure, chronicling the creation of a second Israel. At the same time, it is a novel of life purpose and meaning. Settled happens to be about Israel and the Jews but it is more fundamentally about how we can live in the 21st century, making our own meaning and deciding on our own life purposes. If this genre has not existed before, it does now: Settled is a shining star in the genre of life purpose literature.

Secrets of a Creativity Coach

December 5, 2013

“Eric Maisel is one of the most elegant creativity coaches on the planet. The beauty and simplicity of his work are clearly illustrated throughout Secrets of a Creativity Coach, in which he shares real life examples of his work with various clients. He exemplifies the delicate mastery of an Aikido Black Belt and allows even the novice coach to see how effortless it can be to empower people to fulfill their desire to create!”-Dr. Rosie Kuhn, Founder, Transformational Coaching Training Program

“Eric Maisel’s book provides an honest portrayal of the joys and rigors of coaching the creative spirit. He zeroes in on core issues with admirable precision, and provides students of the creative process, and artists alike, with a useful road map through the twists and bends of creative work.”-Dr. Louisa Foster, founder The Center: Creative Arts Therapy, Mindful Living & Psychotherapy.  

“When I read Coaching the Artist Within I felt like Eric Maisel had reached inside me with his wisdom and guidance. With his new book, Secrets of a Creativity Coach, I’m bowled over by the power of his work. It’s thrilling to read these expert interactions with clients and to see my reflection in their artistic struggles. I’ve learned so much about coaching by reading Eric’s simple and heartfelt responses. It’s like riding shotgun with a master. Reading this book, I feel encouraged to be better in everything I do.”-Steve Harper, TV writer, playwright, actor, and founder, Your Creative Life

Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

September 1, 2013 (Conari Press)

The challenges smart and creative people encounter–from scientific researchers, genius award winners, to bestselling novelists, Broadway actors, high-powered attorneys, and academics–often include anxiety, over-thinking, mania, sadness, and despair.

Specifically, the challenges that smart people face, including:

  • “racing brain syndrome”
  • living in an anti-intellectual culture
  • finding ideas worth loving
  • dealing with boredom and hypersensitivity
  • finding meaning in their lives and their work
  • struggling to achieve success

In Why Smart People Hurt, psychologist Dr. Eric Maisel draws on his many years of work with the best and the brightest to pinpoint these often devastating challenges and offer solutions based on the groundbreaking principles and practices of natural psychology.

His thoughtful strategies include using logic and creativity to cope with the problems of having a brain that goes into overdrive at the drop of a hat. With a series of questions at the end of each chapter, he guides the reader to create his or her own roadmap to a calm and meaningful life.

Why Smart People Hurt is a must-read for parents of gifted children as well as the millions of smart and creative people that are searching for a more meaningful life.

Making Your Creative Mark: Nine Keys to Achieving Your Artistic Goals

April 9, 2013 (New World Library)

Writers, painters, singers, filmmakers, musicians, craftspeople, and actors confront daunting challenges every day. It is hard to produce new work, find success in the marketplace, manage relationships, and keep spirits up. Many doubt that solutions to these very real problems exist, but they do, and world-famous creativity coach Eric Maisel has compiled them in this book. You will learn how to:

* make sense of the challenges of your personality, the challenges inherent in creative work, and the challenges of culture and marketplace
* quiet your overactive mind
* increase motivation and avoid blocks
* engage in practices that create and reinforce meaning
* align self-talk with goals, avoiding negative loops that block creativity
* identify stressors and implement stress-management techniques designed specifically for artists
* maintain emotional intimacy and healthy relationships in the midst of the creative process
* claim your identity as an artist
* rekindle passion for your art and feed that flame during dark days and dry spells

Intended for professional artists and those aspiring toward professional status, this book offers the nuts and bolts of sticking to a successful and fulfilling life in the arts.

Rethinking Depression: How to Shed Mental Health Labels and Create Personal Meaning

In recent decades, much of the unhappiness inherent in the human condition has been monetized into the disease of depression and related “disorders.” Maisel persuasively critiques this sickness model and prescribes a potent new approach that updates the best ideas of modern psychology. The result is a revolutionary reimagining of life’s difficulties and a liberating model of self-care that optimizes our innate human ability to create meaning and seize opportunity — in any circumstance. 

Coaching the Artist Within

Coaching the Artist Within contains a dozen simple lessons for sustaining a creative life. Examples, exercises, and questions help readers explore and reflect on underlying issues that may be keeping them from pursuing their urge to create. Topics include committing, planning and doing, generating mental energy, achieving a centered presence, becoming an anxiety expert, upholding your dream, and maintaining a creative life.

The Van Gogh Blues

Creative people will experience depression—that’s a given. It’s a given because they are regularly confronted by doubts about the meaningfulness of their efforts. Theirs is a kind of depression that does not respond to pharmaceutical treatment. What’s required is healing in the realm of meaning. In this groundbreaking book, Eric Maisel teaches creative people how to handle these recurrent crises of meaning and presents a step-by-step plan for handling their special brand of depression and rediscovering the reasons they are driven to create in the first place.

Mastering Creative Anxiety

In Mastering Creative Anxiety Eric Maisel identifies more than a score of issues that produce anxiety in the lives of creative and performing artists and then presents an anxiety management menu from which to choose the strategies that will work best for you. Mastering Creative Anxiety includes practical insights and proven techniques for overcoming the challenges and fears that plague creators of every kind as well as teaching tales that convey effective approaches to creating fearlessly and abundantly.

Creativity for Life

Over the years, Eric Maisel has worked with thousands of creative people, including writers, musicians, artists, dancers, and actors. He knows firsthand the struggles they must face, and through his many books and professional practice he’s helped them find balance in their lives while pursuing their artistic endeavors. Firmly grounded in psychology, Creativity for Life explores all the challenges confronting an artist: deciding if you have talent (or if that’s even important); determining your level of commitment; pursuing stardom; honing your craft; overcoming blocks; taking care of the business end of your artistic life; finding your place in culture; coming out as an artist; finding love and friendship inside and out of your artistic community; and using your art to explore your inner life. A comprehensive approach to the much-misunderstood artist’s life, this book, contains both nuts-and-bolts ideas and exercises and inspiration to nurture growth as an artist and a person.

Brainstorm

Not all obsessions are to be avoided. A productive obsession, whether for an idea for a novel, a business, or a vaccine, can be chosen deliberately, pursued with determination, and experienced as a powerful source of meaning. In this provocative, practical guide, Maisel coaches you to use our human tendency to obsess to creative advantage, fulfilling both your promise and your promises to yourself. “Elegantly combines the most inspiring elements of mindfulness, engagement, focus, and flow. Eric Maisel shows you how to be more productive by turning obsessions into positive passions.” – Susan K. Perry, Writing in Flow

Creative Recovery

For writers, artists, musicians and creators in every field, this book offers a complete addiction recovery program specifically designed for the creative person. Creative Recovery presents ways to use your own innate creative abilities in the service of your recovery and lays out a complete program for living a fully creative and addiction-free life.

Fearless Creating

In Fearless Creating Dr. Eric Maisel outlines the stages of the creative process, from nurturing the wish to create, choosing your next subject, starting your work, working, completing your work, to showing and selling your work, identifies the anxieties and challenges associated with each stage, and presents tactics and strategies for meeting those challenges.

Affirmations for Artists

Affirmations for Artists is comprised of descriptions of the challenges that artists face, quotations illuminating these challenges, and powerful affirmations that artists can employ to stay emotionally on track as they live the artist’s life. The issues described include sustaining energy, going, deep, handling day jobs, mastering craft, breaking through blocks, dealing with insecurities and mood swings, and many more. To create is to take serious risks and an understanding of the affirmation process is an invaluable resource for the creative risk-taker.

The Creativity Book

The Creativity Book is a complete creativity education in one volume. Everything you need to know to increase and unleash your creativity, by America’s leading expert on the psychological side of creativity. In this book, Maisel presents a complete one-year plan for unleashing your creativity. The Creativity Book includes two discussions/exercises per week and culminates in a guided project of your choice–from working on your current novel to planning a new home business.

Deep Writing

“Psychotherapist Maisel defines deep writing as ‘writing passionately and well about those things that really matter to you.’ It involves seven principles: hushing the mind, holding the intention, making choices, honoring the process, befriending the work, evaluating, and doing what’s required. Maisel follows five fictional writers through the seven steps and offers various exercises. Maisel’s psychological approach sets his work apart from the many inspirational how-to-write books on the market.”—Nancy Shires, Library Journal

Ten Zen Seconds

Ten Zen Seconds presents a powerful, ten-second technique that teaches you how to use a deep breath as a container for a specific thought. This technique is simple to grasp, simple to use, simple to practice and simple to master. You’ll find yourself able to do things that previously felt too difficult to attempt. You’ll be able to calm and center yourself before an important meeting or conversation. You’ll be able to change your basic attitudes about life, becoming calm and positive where before you may have been anxious or pessimistic. Blending Eastern principles of breath awareness and mindfulness with Western principles of positive psychology, Ten Zen Seconds offers a powerful antidote to stress, procrastination and anxiousness.

A Writer’s Paris

The symbolic home for creative people everywhere, Paris has been inspiration for countless artists and writers. In this dynamic book, well-loved author Eric Maisel gives writers the guidance they need to take a literal or figurative soul-renewing artistic sojourn in the city of light. It shares with readers how and why to take a creative visit to Paris, provides logistics for those committed to a trip and inspiration for those who hunger for a taste of the expat life, features the expert advice of America’s foremost creativity coach, and is filled with lessons and anecdotes that convey the spirit of the glorious city. This book will inspire anyone to create.

A Writer’s San Francisco

In this beautiful book, complete with drawings by San Francisco artist Paul Madonna, Eric Maisel provides important lessons for writers and other artists set against the backdrop of San Francisco. Thirty individual essays profile the best sections of the city for pumping up the juices (“The View from Bernal Hill,” “South of Market”), noted literati of the past (“Mark Twain and the Onion”), dealing with those inspiration-inhibiting earthquake fears, and much more.

A Writer’s Space

To write what they want to write the way they want to write it, most writers need to carve out a psychic space as well as a physical one. In A Writer’s Space noted creativity expert and bestselling author Dr. Eric Maisel shows readers how to do just that. He takes writers by the hand and guides them deep into their own creative process, helping them to: identify the emotional and physical impulses that spark their creative process; streamline their writing lives to make the most of the time actually spent writing; devise personalized rituals that get writers writing and keep them writing; find/create a physical space in which to work that complements the writing process; and design a writing schedule that’s easy to keep no matter what.

The Atheist’s Way

In The Atheist’s Way, Eric Maisel teaches you how to make rich personal meaning despite the absence of beneficent gods and the indifference of the universe to human concerns. Exploding the myth that there is any meaning to find or to seek, Dr. Maisel explains why the paradigm shift from seeking meaning to making meaning is this century’s most pressing intellectual goal.

Write Mind

Nothing gets in the way of writing deeply and regularly more powerfully than a writer’s negative thoughts: that he doesn’t have a chance, that he isn’t talented, that it’s too late to start, that selling and marketing are too difficult, and so on. These thoughts produce blockage and rob a writer of the motivational juice needed to start and complete projects. In Write Mind Dr. Maisel presents a simple technique for eliminating these negative thoughts: learn to hear them for what they are and then substitute more productive ones. By providing 299 examples of “wrong thinking” followed by “right thinking” substitutes, Maisel teaches writers how to get a get a grip on their mind so that they can reach their goals and realize their dreams.

Living the Writer’s Life

Presented in a lively format, Living the Writer’s Life offers advice from established authors, along with their personal testimonials on the writing process. Coping with writer’s block, rejection, and the challenges of self-discipline and many other issues are covered. Expert guidance on writers’ conferences, networking, self-promotion, the editorial process, and other matters help aspiring writers or those with writing-career problems to resolve.

What Would Your Character Do?

Not just another dry, how-to instruction book, What Would Your Character Do? is the first interactive guide that encourages writers to get inside their characters’ heads as they create them. This fascinating book: provides more than 20 quizzes to help writers analyze their characters’ traits; features easy-to-understand psychological summaries and prompts for further exploration; and includes a wealth of writing and psychology expertise to help writers create believable characters. Whether readers are exploring how their characters react to the death of a loved one or how their characters learned to ride a bike, they’re sure to emerge with more compelling heroes, heroines and villains than ever before.

The Art of the Book Proposal

Here is an expert’s guide through the elements of a nonfiction book proposal, including the outline, chapter summaries, marketing/publicity, book and chapter titles, and more. Filled with exercises designed to help a writer conceive and create a desirable proposal, and checklists to keep track of the project’s progress, The Art of the Book Proposal provides the framework on which to build a great idea, as well as intelligent, empathetic instruction on how to produce a proposal that will capture the interest of an agent or editor. While most how-to writing books focus only on the nuts and bolts of putting a proposal together, Maisel, considered by many to be America’s foremost expert on the psychological side of the creative process, also helps the writer overcome mental barriers to producing the best work possible.

Performance Anxiety

A complete program for handling performance anxiety, with performance anxiety broadly defined to include the anxiety that wells up in a creator when she faces the blank canvas or the blank computer screen. Many techniques for managing performance anxiety are described, among them cognitive techniques, relaxation techniques, disidentification techniques, and guided visualizations. Maisel is a creativity coach, trained as a family therapist, and has been working with creative and performing artists for more than twenty years and writing for thirty-five years.

Toxic Criticism

Sometimes painful barbs from friends, family, coworkers, or strangers can lodge in our minds and eat away at our core. When you allow criticism–even self-criticism–to affect you that powerfully, it can be toxic. And if you don’t break the cycle, toxic criticism can make you sick, strain relationships, and prevent you from fulfilling your dreams. But you don’t have to live that way! By using the proven strategies in Toxic Criticism, you can deflect any hurtful comment that comes your way, rationally decide whether the criticism has any validity, and, if you choose, give a calculated response or use it as an opportunity to make a positive change.

20 Communication Tips at Work

Despite all the high-tech advances of the last several years, one aspect of the work environment remains sadly inefficient: coworkers’ ability to communicate well. Emails abound, teleconferences connect distant offices, and deals are closed in a matter of minutes. Yet most of the things people accomplish — or don’t — depend on their ability to communicate with others. These 20 tips, designed to serve both employee and employer, include advice on how to offer critical feedback, understand the messages one receives, sort out motivations, offer praise, and keep people informed. Each suggestion is followed by an explanation along with examples. Brief exercises help readers assess their own communication skills.

20 Communication Tips for Families

Aimed at busy parents who want to improve their relationships with their spouses and children, 20 Communication Tips for Families lays out in simple terms commonsense ideas that can apply to any family: be direct but kind; don’t let your stress do the talking; the first duty of love is to listen; and more. A short explanation follows each tip, expanding on it and giving concrete examples of how to implement it.

Dismay

“Imagine turning a San Francisco high school into a sordid pantheon and the pleasures of High Camp. Maisel does a splendid job of providing acute observations all the way on Bay Area living and the life (woe is me!) of our times. There are so many good comic turns in this tour de force of style, I’d be hard pressed to list them all. This is superior stuff.” – Michael Rubin, A Trip Into Town and Whistle Me Home

The Fretful Dancer

Funny and poignant, The Fretful Dancer is about an underutilized, underemployed Brooklyn Heights denizen who decides that he wants to become a modern-day saint. Since he has no idea what that actually means, he decides to try his hand at good deeds like “saving” his neighbor from her battering husband. But nothing turns out as he expects. Enjoy this comic novel by the author of Dismay, The Blackbirds of Mulhouse, Aster Lynn, and Murder in Berlin.

Artists Speak

A blank journal with quotes for the creative spirit. In pocketsize and journal-size editions, this journal/sketchbook of inspiring quotes from artists in every field helps readers connect with their own creative process. Includes quotes from Norman Mailer, Picasso, Janice Joplin, Mozart, Georgia O’Keefe, and others. A beautiful gift and self-gift.

Writers and Artists on Devotion

A blank journal with quotes for the creative spirit. Writers and other creative people will appreciate this beautifully designed compendium of thematic quotations. Artists on Devotion offers more than 200 thought-provoking quotes about the discipline and dedication required to create art. Pablo Picasso, Flannery O’Connor, Robert De Niro, and Joyce Carol Oates are among those who share their wisdom. A beautiful gift and a beautiful self-gift.

Writers and Artists on Love

A blank journal with quotes for the creative spirit. Brief quotations on each page of this volume in the Quotable Muse series delve into the nature of love – both as a romantic endeavor and as a fuel for creativity. Contributors represent a variety of mediums: there are dancers, actors, comedians, composers, poets, painters, and more. Included are such luminaries as Colette, Whistler, Nikki Giovanni, Louise Nevelson, Sue Townsend, and Allen Ginsberg. A beautiful gift item and a beautiful self-gift.

Everyday You

Eric Maisel has written more than thirty books to help people live more creative lives despite the difficulties our society throws in our path. In Everyday You, Maisel takes a fresh and innovative approach to inspire all who would live a mindful, joyful life, grounded and connected to their work, their families, their own spirit.

Everyday Calm

Award-winning creativity coach and therapist, Eric Maisel, offers the A Little Every Day Deck series to help readers develop a more centered, creative, intelligent life. Each card in the series presents a single idea and a simple exercise to try every day.

Everyday Creative

Award-winning creativity coach and therapist, Eric Maisel, offers the A Little Every Day Deck series to help readers develop a more centered, creative, intelligent life. Each card in the series presents a single idea and a simple exercise to try every day.

Everyday Smart

Award-winning creativity coach and therapist, Eric Maisel, offers the A Little Every Day Deck series to help readers develop a more centered, creative, intelligent life. Each card in the series presents a single idea and a simple exercise to try every day.

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