Feeling anxiety in your creative work or life lately? Are you Overwhelmed? Critical? Reluctant? Confused? Defeated?
I started work on a new project this week, and I felt all of those things.
Anxiety will have us believe that we suck, our work sucks and that all is lost at least once at every stage of our creative process.
Each stage of a creative process - from conception to completion has its own painful brand of anxiety that shows up like clockwork at predictable moments just to remind us that what we are creating is risky and unmanageable and that we should consider bailing immediately.
Declaring a creative path is a very risky proposition in the scheme of human evolution.
Anxiety wants us to feel lost.
It wants to overwhelm our curiosity, to stall us, and to scare us into going back to the status quo anxiety of every day life where it believes that we'll be safe from harm.
Yesterday, a beloved client exclaimed "I've changed!"
Evidence was all around her in the tangible goals she had achieved and visible in the powerful choices she had recently made to honor her creative commitments.
She surprised herself with her clarity.
She described feeling a molting or shedding of the weight of many layers of fear from the past. She felt that she was emerging so much more courageously and authentically than she believed was possible six months ago ago.
And while all this is true, she is also appropriately anxious about the creative risks she is currently taking.
In his book Fearless Creating, creativity coach and author Eric Maisel, offers remedies for anxiety at each stage of a creative process from wishing to create to completing and showing your work to the public.
In the next ten days my client is pitching her first book to agents and producing a public event in which she will present herself as an author in a bigger way than she has before.
If she didn't feel anxious, I'd worry.
But after much practice over some years she recognizes the ways in which her anxiety will seek to shake her, and she focuses instead on the vitality that it allows her to feel.
She can call it fear, but she chooses to to call it excitement.
She has learned strategies to prepare her body, heart and mind so that she can arrive fully present.
She is willing to feel some fear because she is certain that she belongs here and she is willing to take a risk to grow in the direction she has long desired to grow.
You are not lost when you feel anxious.
You are inside of a creative process.
So don't bail!
Invite anxiety in and learn how to respond to what it needs from you to feel safe in the moment you are in.
If you want to live a creative life, you are going to have to invite anxiety in.
If you believe that the anxiety of a creative process is preferable to the anxiety of not creating at all, then you will must learn to recognize where you are inside of your creative process - on your way to some place lighter and more true.
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